Abstract
Family planning in the Philippines is a complex topic because of difficulties in accessing modern contraceptives exacerbated by various external factors. Because of this, Filipinos go to social media to seek reproductive health information, especially among health professional content creators. To further bridge the gap between health communication and social media, this study aimed to analyze how parasocial relationships (PSRs) with health professionals in TikTok contributed to Filipinos’ contraceptive habits using a quantitative research design through a self-administered survey. Anchored on the Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction (IMBP) and the PSR, results revealed that stronger the PSR with the health professional, the higher the likelihood that the respondents generally have a positive attitude regarding modern contraceptives, have most of their friends think that they should use modern contraceptives, have high confidence in their ability to use modern contraceptives, and have positive intentions of using modern contraceptives. Nonetheless, results show that PSR, contraceptive access, and contraceptive intent do not influence contraceptive behavior but contraceptive knowledge does. So even though health professionals on TikTok are doing their job in disseminating accurate contraceptive information through their social media platforms, affecting an increase in one’s contraceptive knowledge, this becomes obsolete when individuals are not given the proper physical resources to actually acquire these methods of contraceptives. This thus emphasizes the importance of interventions, perhaps in policy or with influencers, in improving contraceptive access, and not solely contraceptive knowledge, by acknowledging, lessening, and resolving external factors that prohibit the transition from contraceptive intent to behavior.
Author Information
Nicole Claire A. Desierto, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines
Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2024
Stream: Social Media and Communication Technology
This paper is part of the MediAsia2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Desierto N. (2024) In Birth Control We Trust: Analyzing Modern Contraception Behavior and Parasocial Relationships With Health Personalities Online ISSN: 2186-5906 – The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 309-331) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2024.26
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2024.26
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