| Sumario: | Purpose E-health literacy refers to the ability to search, locate, and evaluate health information from electronic resources to address or solve a problem. Despite the importance of e-health literacy on health, there is little knowledge on the associated predictors with e-health literacy in Korean adults. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which e-health literacy is associated with social relationship (e.g., social connectedness, social support), psychological factors (e.g., anxiety, depressive symptoms), and access to health information factors (e.g., internet news, SNS, the importance of internet access to health information) among younger, middle-aged, and older Korean adults. This study also examined the moderating effects of age on these associations. Method We used a cross-sectional survey of 2,400 Korean adults aged 20 years or older. Major constructs were measured by: (1) e-health literacy (Paige et al., 2017); (2) social connectedness scale-revised (Lee & Robbins, 1995); (3) MOS-Social support survey-6 (Holden et al., 2014); (4) the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) (Spitzer et al., 2006); and (5) the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression-10 (CESD-10) (Andresen et al., 1994). Descriptive statistics, ANOVA, chi-square test, and hierarchical multiple linear regression were used for data analyses. Results and Discussion Findings of this study demonstrated that access to health information factors predicted e-health literacy better than social relationship and psychological factors across all three age groups. However, there were age group differences in the associations of internet news, SNS, and social connectedness with e-health literacy among Korean adults. This study emphasizes the importance of identifying e-health related risk factors leading to health disparities according to different age groups.
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