The mediating role of E-health literacy and physical literacy in developing nutrition, physical activity, and health beliefs

Abstract

Background E-health literacy is considered an important factor that may influence adolescents' ability to access, evaluate, and use digital health information, potentially shaping their health-related beliefs and behaviors. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain insufficiently understood. Physical literacy has been suggested to facilitate the translation of health information into meaningful beliefs and actions. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between e-health literacy and nutrition beliefs, physical activity beliefs, and health beliefs among high school students, with a particular focus on the potential mediating role of physical literacy.Methods This study was conducted using the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. A total of 816 high school students participated in the study; 484 were male, and 332 were female. Pearson correlation analysis was applied to examine the relationships between e-health literacy, healthy lifestyle beliefs and physical literacy. In the study, e-health literacy was considered the independent variable, healthy lifestyle beliefs were the dependent variable, and physical literacy was the mediating variable. To evaluate the effect of the mediating variable, the bias-corrected analysis method with 5,000 bootstraps was used, and it was verified that the confidence intervals did not contain zero values.Results E-health literacy was significantly associated with nutrition beliefs, physical activity beliefs, and health beliefs both directly and indirectly. It was determined that physical literacy mediated the relationships between e-health literacy and nutrition beliefs, physical activity beliefs and health beliefs. The shared variance explained by e-health literacy and physical literacy was 48% for nutrition, 57% for physical activity, and 52% for health beliefs. It was also detected that e-health literacy accounted for 22% of the variance in physical literacy.Conclusion The study showed that there was a correlation between e-health literacy and healthy lifestyle beliefs. As the level of e-health literacy increases, healthy lifestyle beliefs are also promoted. On the other hand, the study's result showed that there was a positive significant relationship between e-health literacy and physical literacy. As a result, it was determined that physical literacy has a mediating effect on the relationship between e-health literacy and nutrition, physical activity, and health beliefs.