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Despite the prevalence of technology in health care, marketing research on social media in the birthspace is limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore how birthing women leverage social media for transformative well-being in the liminal context of birth.

A qualitative study of women who had recently experienced birth was undertaken. Thematic analysis of data from in-depth interviews reveals birthing women’s digital practices and social media capabilities for well-being in a liminal space.

Within the birthspace, women use social media and digital platforms in an effortful and goal-directed way for role transitions and transformation, curating self and other history, goal striving and normalizing experience. These digital practice styles facilitate consumer integration of the liminal digital birthspace and in situ service encounter enabling diverse value outcomes. Drawing on liminality and social presence theories, the authors interpret these practices as demonstrating three interactive liminal stages of suspending, comprehending and transforming. Multi-modality and rapid connection afforded by digital devices and social media platforms provide social presence (according to perceived immediacy and intimacy) enabling transformative well-being outcomes.

This study is unique, as it provides insights into the traditionally private health service experience of birth. Further, the authors extend the understanding of liminal spaces and use of digital technology, specifically for transformative outcomes, by proposing a framework of consumers’ digital practice styles for well-being in liminal spaces.

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought attention to the variables that influence the mental health of health workers who are entrusted with nursing individuals. Despite the fact that many articles have examined the effects of social media usage on mental health, there is a lack of research synthesizing learning from this body of research. The purpose of this study is to use text mining and citation-based bibliometric analysis to conduct a detailed review of extant literature on health workers’ mental health and social networking habits.

This study conducts a full-text analysis of 36 articles selected on health workers' mental health and social media using text-mining techniques in R programming and a bibliometric citation analysis of 183 papers from the Scopus database in VOS viewer software. But the limitations of the methods used in this study are that the bibliometric analysis was limited to the Scopus database because the VOS viewer program did not support any other database and the text-mining approach caused the natural processing redundancy.

The bibliometric analysis reveals the thematic networks that exist in the literature of health workers’ mental health and social networking. The findings from text mining identified ten topic models, which helped to find the related papers classified in ten different groups and are provided alongside a summary of the published research and a list of the primary authors with posterior probability through Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first hybrid review, combining text mining and bibliometric review, on health workers’ mental health where social networking plays a moderating role. This paper critically provides an overview of the impact of social networking on health workers' mental health, presents the most important and frequent topics, introduces the scientific visualization of articles published in the Scopus database and suggests further research avenues. These findings are important for academics, health practitioners and medical specialists interested in learning how to better support the mental health of health workers using social media.

Quality of life is dependent on a healthy lifestyle and the self-care behavior of individuals. The study's purpose is to find out the determinants of individuals' self-care behavior. As such, self-care behavior is influenced by several factors that include individual knowledge, available information sources and their use, information-seeking related skills and cognitive state.

A quantitative research design followed using a questionnaire-based survey method. A total of 384 responses from the Pakistani public were collected using the convenience sampling technique. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed for examining the possible link between the variables.

Health literacy, Internet and social media use, and health information-seeking behavior had a direct/indirect positive impact on self-care behavior, but health anxiety had a negative impact. Health literacy and health information-seeking behavior positively mediated the relationship among Internet and social media use health anxiety and self-care.

Improving health literacy appears to be key to supporting better self-care, but it is an exploratory study, more research is required to confirm these findings. Policymakers, health professionals and information professionals should work together to improve health literacy and support informed self-care among the population.

Thus far, no previous study has examined the collective role of social media exposure, health anxiety, health literacy and health information-seeking behavior as predictors of self-care behavior. Although self-care behavior among the general population might be different compared to chronic patients, only few studies have examined the former as a unit of analysis.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the media in the United Kingdom portrayed hospital discharge to care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study was a qualitative document analysis. Four sources (Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian and BBC News) were selected to represent political orientations encompassing right-wing, centrist and left-wing perspectives, and were searched for mention of hospital discharge, care homes and Covid-19 pandemic between 1st January 2020 and 24th February 2022. Article text was copied verbatim into Microsoft Word documents prior to analysis. Data were thematically analysed, followed by coding the sentiment in the included articles as well as coding the sentiment of themes and sub-themes.

Of 722 identified articles, 133 were eligible for inclusion as the final corpus. Data represented a moralistic narrative consisting of four themes: (1) Government as villain, (2) care homes as antiheroes, (3) patients as ideal victims and (4) moral outcomes. Most of the corpus had a negative sentiment (78.1%). One theme, moral outcomes, had considerably more positive sentiment (32.4%) than others (range 15.1%–21.9%).

A moralistic argument for improving cross-boundary interactions between health and social care services is provided, and the media can play a role pushing cross-boundary working higher up the policy agenda. Future work should examine how direct stakeholders, including those working in healthcare and care home settings, perceived the discharge policy.

Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.

The global Covid-19 pandemic is posing considerable challenges for governments throughout the world and has and will have a significant influence on the shape of peoples social and economic life and wellbeing in the short and longer term. This opinion paper discusses the current health policy response adopted in England to control or manage the epidemic and identifies the key sociological and political influences which have shaped these policies. Drawing on the theoretical approach set out in his recent book, which emphasises the interplay of powerful structural and economic interest groups, the author will consider the influence of the key players. Government policy has tied itself to scientific and medical evidence and protecting the NHS so the key roles of the medical profession, public health scientific community and NHS management and their respective and relative powerful influences will be discussed. The government needs the support of the public if their policies are to be successful, so how have the government addressed maintaining public trust in this “crisis” and how much trust do the public have in the government and what has influenced it? The strong emphasis on social distancing and social isolation in the national government policy response to Covid-19 has placed an increasing public reliance on the traditional and social media for sources of information so how the media has framed the policy will be considered. One policy aim is for an effective vaccine and the influence of the drug industry in its development is discussed. Finally, the role of the state will be discussed and what has shaped its social and economic policies.

During COVID-19 restrictions, people spent more time in cyberspace and consuming health-related information. An increase was also observed in mediated caring messages or health-relevant information sent to one another. This study aims to explore how the information and interactions around COVID-19 can provide a good learning opportunity for public health, specifically related to eHealth literacy and eHealth promotion.

While mainstream literature has concentrated on experimental designs and a priming effect, this study inspects psychological distance related to a health threat under real-life circumstances. The article adopted a survey approach and utilized PLS-SEM techniques to examine the proposed hypotheses.

Results indicated that whereas closer social support correlates with closer psychological distance and less usage of the social media approach, more substantial COVID-19 impacts were associated with closer psychological distance but greater use of social media. Since both closer psychological distance and social media approach contribute to eHealth literacy, social support from closer and virtual social networks should be embraced but utilized through different routes and for different purposes. The timing of messages but not psychological distance affects people's social media approach, indicating that morning messages should be employed. Moreover, eHealth literacy mediates timing preferences and leads to a preference for eHealth communication earlier in the day. Overall, morning messages create a virtuous circle during a health crisis.

This paper establishes a mechanism of virtuous cycles for eHealth communication during a health threat. Additionally, it bridges existing research gaps by expanding chronopsychology and CLT in the health domain using an empirical approach, a real-life case and an extension of performance regarding information-seeking and utilization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) allows the brand to co-create value with young customers through mobile apps. However, as many brands claim that their mobile apps are using the most updated AI technology, young customers face app fatigue and start questioning the authenticity of this touchpoint. This paper aims to study the mediating effect of authenticity for the value co-creation of AI-powered branded applications.

Drawing from regulatory engagement theory, this study conceptualize authenticity as the key construct in customers’ value experience process, which triggers customer value co-creation. Two scenario-based online experiments are conducted to collect data from 444 young customers. Data analysis is performed using ANOVA and Process Hayes.

The results reveal that perceived authenticity is an important mediator between media richness (chatbot vs AI text vs augmented reality) and value co-creation. There is no interaction effect of co-brand fit (high vs low) and source endorsement (doctor vs government) on the relationship between media richness and perceived authenticity, whereas injunctive norms (high vs low) strengthen this relationship.

The finding provides insights for marketing managers on engaging young customers suffering from app fatigue. Authenticity holds the key to young customers’ technological perceptions.

This research highlights the importance of perceived authenticity in encouraging young customers to co-create value. Young customers consider authenticity as a motivational force experience that involves customers through the app’s attributes (e.g. media richness) and social standards (e.g. norms), rather than brand factors (e.g. co-brand fit, source endorsement).