Page 73 - AEI Insights 2018 Vol 4 Issue 1

Hashim et al, 2018

In Sweden (see Table 6(a)), expert talks in public, family and friends, and social media were
seen as both trustworthy and easy to understand, while public institutions and government
agencies were trustworthy, but not easy to understand and journals and blogs were easy to
understand, but not trustworthy.

In Malaysia (see Table 6(b)), only public institutions were seen as both trustworthy and fairly
easy to understand. Newspapers, blogs, YouTube/Vimeo and social media were seen as easy
to understand, but not trustworthy. Private institutions, government agencies, journals and
expert talks were seen as trustworthy but not easy to understand.

The participants were asked to evaluate the information about diets and exercises obtained from
different sources, presented in Table 7:

Table 7: Usefulness of information; ranked list in order of usefulness. The numbers are presented in the
table as means of rankings on a 5 step Likert scale, from 1 (least useful) to 5 (most useful).

Information Means total
Sweden Malaysia
Public institution 2.17 4.02
Government agencies 2.18 3.99
Private institution 2.18 3.88
Expert talks 2.97 3.79
Journal articles 2.85 3.68
Newspaper 1.96 3.58
Radio/TV programs 2.40 3.55
Family/friends 3.00 3.48
Leaflets 2.04 3.35
Blogs 2.95 3.26
YouTube/Vimeo 2.52 3.13
Social media 3.14 3.08
Alternative (traditional) 2.13 2.99
medicine

For Sweden, social media, family/friends, expert talks, blogs and journal articles are considered
to provide the most useful information, while newspapers, leaflets, alternative medicine and
public/private healthcare institutions as well as governmental agencies rank lowest. For
Malaysian Malays, public institutions, government agencies, private institutions, expert talks
and journal articles rank the highest in terms of usefulness of information. Lowest ranked for
the Malaysian Malays are You Tube/Vimeo, social media and traditional/alternative medicine.

Respondents were asked some open-ended questions concerning governmental agencies and
the answers are given below. The questions concerned whether the respondents had read
anything provided by governmental agencies concerning what to eat and if so, where, if it was
easy to understand and if it was useful or not (plus motivation). They also concerned if the
respondents applied the advice and if so they were asked to give examples. Further questions
concerned what information influenced the respondents the most, how it influenced them, and
what would make them change their eating habits.

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