Evaluating the Role of Social Media in Promoting a Health-Oriented Lifestyle and Behavior Change: A Health Management Approach

Abstract

Social media has become a powerful setting in which health-related information, norms, and everyday lifestyle choices are shaped. Yet its role in promoting a health-oriented lifestyle is not uniform because outcomes depend on content credibility, network dynamics, and contextual constraints such as access costs, infrastructure quality, filtering, and government interference. This study evaluated the role of social media in promoting a health-oriented lifestyle and explained the mechanism of behavior change from a health management perspective using a mixed-methods design. In the qualitative phase, experts in sport, health, and social media were recruited through purposive snowball sampling until theoretical saturation. Interviews were analyzed using systematic grounded theory (open and axial coding) to build a paradigm-based conceptual model. In the quantitative phase, sport media consumers completed a researcher-developed questionnaire; 374 valid responses were analyzed. The measurement and structural models were examined using PLS-SEM (SmartPLS), with convergent validity assessed via AVE and discriminant validity via the Fornell–Larcker criterion. Qualitative findings organized the phenomenon into seven domains: informational factors, cultural factors, campaigns/online communities, communication pathways, intervening factors, contextual conditions, and outcomes, with social media identified as the core phenomenon, behavior change as the main strategy, and a health-oriented lifestyle as the final outcome. Quantitative results showed that all main paths were significant (p < .001): causal conditions predicted the core phenomenon; the core phenomenon predicted strategies; contextual and intervening factors affected strategies; and strategies predicted outcomes. The strongest indicators were sport culture (0.91), communication pathways (0.89), accessible/new information (0.87), and campaigns/online communities (0.81), while intervening constraints were dominated by filtering (0.92) and government interference (0.86). The model explained moderate variance in endogenous constructs (R² = 0.47 for the core phenomenon, 0.45 for strategies, and 0.42 for outcomes). Social media can facilitate healthier lifestyles through staged behavior change, provided that supportive conditions are strengthened and constraining factors are managed.