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Social media has emerged as a primary source of information, entertainment, and communication. Social media dependence is expected to have an impact on many important aspects of a person’s life, including peer communication, trust, public engagement and purchase behaviors. Built on the Internet Dependency Scale and the Television Affinity Scale, Men and Tsai developed a four-item, one-dimension scale that measures social media dependency. As an initial test of construct validity, Men and Tsai examined the effects of social media dependency on relational outcomes utilizing structural equation modeling. Individual media dependency theory explains how users rely on using a particular media to satisfy individual goals. Both social psychological factors and structural factors influence the formation of media dependency. People who rely more on social media tended to be more engaged and have more interactions with corporate social media pages than those users who rely less on the technology.

The purpose of this study is to better understand how physicians utilize social media technologies to facilitate patient communication and the motivations and barriers towards doing so. Additionally, it explores how power distances influences physician’s willingness to utilize social media as a resource in health communication by conducting in-depth interviews with physicians in the United States and in the Phillippines, based on divergent power distance scores from Hofstede’s (2010) research. Qualitative analysis of transcripts revealed two major themes : 1) hesitancy in utilizing social media in doctorpatient communication for diagnosis and treatment; and 2) the role of social media for marketing, education, and communicating with hard-to-reach patients. These findings suggest that although physicians understand the many possible benefits of utilizing social media for health communication, there are many other factors to consider. Cultural issues should be taken into account as future social media health communication programs are developed.