The Effect of Health Communication on Reader Attitudes with Digital Media Literacy Antecedents

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic in Indonesia is increasing daily. Unfortunately, the implementation of lockdown is not enforced in some areas. Meanwhile, in these current pandemic conditions, health communication is needed. This research describes health communication concepts, readers’ attitudes, and digital media literacy. Furthermore, the digital media literacy antecedent focuses on understanding attitudes in handling hoax information and people infected with Coronavirus. A quantitative approach with the forecasting method was used in this research. It showed that Health Communication has a linear regression value of 0.49 with a significance of 0.000 on the reader's attitude variables. There is an influence between health communications on the reader's attitudes. Likewise, digital media has a regression result of 0.51 with a significant value of 0.000 on reader's attitudes indicating that digital media influences reader's attitudes. Subsequently, developing digital media literacy and reader attitudes in health communication is important. It is hoped that future research will be able to elaborate on health communication and digital media literacy in the wider community and use adapted methods.