Predicting Health Information Avoidance Intentions and Behaviors: Combining a Pre-Survey and In-Situ Measurement of Individuals Affected by Acute or Chronic Health Challenges

Given the increasing scholarly attention to health information avoidance, the current study offers a more nuanced perspective on this communication phenomenon by predicting avoidance intention and behavior and examining their interrelationship. Guided by a reduced version of the proposed model of planned risk information avoidance (PRIA), a combination of a pre-survey capturing the predictors of avoidance intention and an in-situ measurement of avoidance behavior showed that the model explained 36.1% of the variance in avoidance intention, but only 6% of the variance in the occurrence of avoidance behavior and 5.1% of the variance in the frequency of avoidance behavior. Together with the weak correlation between avoidance intention and behavior, this finding revealed an intention-behavior gap for health information avoidance and suggests that the two measures represent different dimensions of health information avoidance. These findings are critical for conceptual clarity, call for distinguishing the predictors of avoidance intention and behavior within the PRIA, and provide guidance for methodological decisions.