Information challenges of COVID‑19: A qualitative research
Volume 11, Issue 6, July 2021, Pages 1-9
. Golrokh Atighechian, . Fatemeh Rezaei, . Nahid Tavakoli, . Mitra Abarghoian
Abstract BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID‑19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health and
Medical Education set up a 24‑h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people’s worries and
anxieties, create composure, increase people’s trust, and answer their questions. This qualitative
study aimed to identify the challenges of COVID‑19‑related‑information among people in point of
experts’ views.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of experts
on the identification of the Information challenges of COVID‑19 during March–June 2020. The
research population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initially
purposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participants
were interviewed. The data were collected using a semi‑structured interview. After collecting the data,
the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements.
MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data.
RESULTS: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trust
in government, lack of COVID‑19‑integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest,
lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor information
quality, classified into 16 categories.
CONCLUSIONS: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack of
a scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume of
information in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channels
that caused confusion among people.