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NOVEMBER 20-21, 2020 ONLINE


Healthcare Communications in the Middle East

Schedule

November 21, 2020, 09:30 - 10:30
Presented by

Understanding the level of emergence of Social Media as a next generation platform for health communication among youth in Malaysia

Yesuselvi Manickam

Sunway University

yesuselvim@sunway.edu.my

The issue of youth sexual behaviour leading to pre-marital heterosexual sexual issues is a pervasive problem around the world. Active engagement and involvement in sexual activity among youth in Malaysia has brought many health and social issues; among them namely, pregnancy out of wedlock, abortion, baby dumping, transmitting STD’s and HIV and AIDS (Nik Farid et al, 2018). However, the information pertaining to this issue is very limited in the mainstream media so awareness of this issue is very limited among youth as well and these cases are becoming increasingly common in Malaysia. Therefore, this study aims to gain understanding of the use of social media as channel to seek information related to pre-marital sexual issues among youth in Malaysia and the benefits and the challenges of using social media as an information platform. By using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study aims to examine the use and attitude toward social media as an information platform amongst youth in Malaysia. The collected data will be quantitatively based in a survey questionnaire that included 384 respondents from Klang Valley. The findings showed that social media became the main source of information among youth when they have problems related to this issue.