Opinion Leaders and Health Information: A Systematic Literature Review in Indonesia

Abstract

The outbreak of the pandemic covid-19 massively shocked the entire world, including Indonesia. Since its first findings of infected people, there has been a tremendous amount of information exposure related to health information and how to prevent the spread of this deadly virus. These exposures are overwhelming, and many hoaxes have also emerged. The people are in doubt about all this information and rely on opinion leaders to validate this information. Opinion leaders are individuals who take the lead in influencing other people's opinions. Opinion leaders are crucial in Lazardfled's 'two-step flows' theory in 1944, which emphasizes that mass media has no direct influence on the general public. Instead, ideas often flow from radio and print media to opinion leaders and of them to the less active part of the population. This article used a systematic review research method for analyzing research articles that have been published before. The article focuses on research results and their implications because it aims to map findings and draw conclusions regarding opinion leaders in Indonesia during the pandemic. The search was conducted on Google Scholar by limiting the search results to articles published in the 2020-2019 time frame, where 41 articles were analyzed. Results found from the research that articles underlined the significant roles and strategies of opinion leaders in this pandemic era. Various opinion leaders pointed out in most articles included religious leaders, community leaders, traditional leaders, social media influencers, and politicians. These opinion leaders are actively involved in preventing the spread of Covid- 19 as educators, motivators, influencers (persuasion), and role models. They generally convey two categories of messages: educational messages related to Covid-19 and non-educational ones such as motivational ones.