Icelandic Citizens’ Everyday Life Health Information Behaviour

Abstract

The article presents some of the results from research on Icelandic citizens’ behaviour regarding information about health and lifestyle in the context of their everyday life. The focus is on the socio-cognitive aspects of information behaviour. The research was carried out as a postal survey using a random sample of 1000 people aged 18–80. The findings support the notion that human information behaviour is being shaped by cognitive and social factors together. The results demonstrate a relationship between respondents’ information seeking styles, sex and education. Women were found to seek more information than men, and they were also found to be more likely to consider the information useful than men. Respondents’ level of education appears to affect their information seeking habits, especially among women. Level of education also relates to how people value the reliability of information from the different sources.