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TikTok and Public Health
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TikTok and Public Health

A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2023) | Viewed by 10702

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Jon-Patrick Allem

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Keck School of Medicine of USC, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA
Interests: preventive medicine; social media; tobacco control; health communication
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

I am currently organizing a Special Issue titled “TikTok and Public Health” for the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. This journal is peer-reviewed and publishes articles in the interdisciplinary area of environmental health sciences and public health.

TikTok displays unending streams of videos and primarily serves to entertain its users rather than to act as a vehicle to connect friends. TikTok is the most successful video app in the world, with over a billion people spending time on its platform every month. TikTok is especially popular among adolescents and young adults. However, research focused on TikToks’ impact on public health has not kept pace with its popularity.

This Special Issue has two specific aims: 1) to highlight TikToks’ potential impact on issues related to public health and 2) highlight how data collected from TikTok can be used to inform public health, public policy, communication campaigns, and clinical care. In general, this Special Issue is seeking original submissions that examine (1) how users interact with the platform, including problematic use, (2) how products and services are promoted on the platform, especially products (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, supplements, videogames, etc.) that have effects on health, (3) the extent, source, and quality of medical information on the platform, (4) the extent and type of public health-related (e.g., vaccines, cancer, alternative medicine, supplements) misinformation on the platform, and (5) TikToks’ ability to serve as a vehicle to promote health and/or deliver interventions. In this Special Issue, original research articles and brief reports summarizing pilot data or proof of concept studies are welcome.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Jon-Patrick Allem
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • adolescent health
  • health communication
  • health education
  • health policy
  • public health
  • TikTok
  • social influencers
  • social media
  • marketing
  • young adults

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

11 pages, 521 KiB  
Article
What Drives the Influence of Health Science Communication Accounts on TikTok? A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis
by Ran Liu, Tianan Yang, Wenhao Deng, Xiaoyan Liu and Jianwei Deng
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(21), 13815; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192113815 - 24 Oct 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2313
Abstract
Medical institutions face a variety of challenges as they seek to enhance their reputation and increase the influence of their social media accounts. Becoming a social media influencer in the health field in today’s complex online environment requires integrated social and technical systems. [...] Read more.
Medical institutions face a variety of challenges as they seek to enhance their reputation and increase the influence of their social media accounts. Becoming a social media influencer in the health field in today’s complex online environment requires integrated social and technical systems. However, rather than holistically investigating the mechanism of account influence, studies have focused on a narrow subset of social and technical conditions that drive online influence. We attribute this to the mismatch between complex causality problems and traditional symmetric regression methods. In this study, we adopted an asymmetric configurational perspective that allowed us to test a causally complex model of the conditions that create strong and not-strong account influence. We used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to detect the effects of varying configurations of three social system characteristics (i.e., an oncology-related attribute, a public attribute, and comment interaction) and two technical system characteristics (i.e., telepresence and video collection) on the TikTok accounts of 63 elderly Chinese doctors (60 to 92 years old). Our results revealed two pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to strong account influence and three pathways associated with distinct sociotechnical configurations to not-strong account influence. Furthermore, the results confirmed that a single antecedent condition cannot, on its own, produce an outcome, i.e., account influence. Multiple inter-related conditions are required to produce an influential account. These results offer a more holistic picture of how health science communication accounts operate and reconcile the scattered results in the literature. We also demonstrate how configurational theory and methods can be used to analyze the complexities of social media platforms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue TikTok and Public Health)
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13 pages, 1040 KiB  
Article
Using Structural Equation Modeling to Examine Pathways between Physical Activity and Sleep Quality among Chinese TikTok Users
by Xing Zhang, Siyuan Feng, Rui Peng and Hansen Li
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(9), 5142; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095142 - 23 Apr 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 6830
Abstract
TikTok, the most popular social media, brings various benefits to nowadays living. However, the problematic use of TikTok has also elicited a range of health problems, such as sleep problems. Physical activity (PA) appears to play a protective role in the problematic use [...] Read more.
TikTok, the most popular social media, brings various benefits to nowadays living. However, the problematic use of TikTok has also elicited a range of health problems, such as sleep problems. Physical activity (PA) appears to play a protective role in the problematic use of TikTok and its health consequences, but the pathways between PA and sleep health are understudied. Therefore, we aimed to propose a framework to check whether PA can benefit the sleep health of TikTok users by reducing bedtime delays for TikTok. Stress and mental health issues were also considered as they are potential mediators between PA and sleep health and may also influence the problematic use of smartphones. A cross-sectional investigation that involved 660 Chinese TikTok users was conducted in April 2021. The volume of PA, perceived stress (PSS-10), depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), bedtime delay for TikTok use, and sleep quality (PSQI) were investigated through an online questionnaire survey. Structural equation modeling was employed to examine pathways from PA to sleep quality through stress, mental health issues (depression and anxiety), and bedtime delay for TikTok. We found that PA exerted a significant effect on sleep quality through indirect pathways (β = −0.056, p = 0.001). Stress was a critical mediator of all indirect pathways, and the pathway mediated by stress and mental health issues made a major contribution to the total effect (β = −0.048, p = 0.002). The identified pathways mediated by bedtime delay for TikTok were relatively weak but significant. PA showed a distinct effect on bedtime delay for TikTok through stress and mental health issues (β = −0.043, p = 0.001). In conclusion, our framework highlights some pathways to understanding the benefits of PA on TikTok users’ sleep quality. Future research is warranted to explore extra indirect pathways and re-examine the causal relationships between variables. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue TikTok and Public Health)
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