Background: YouTube™ is considered a convenient and popular platform to seek healthcare information, which is uploaded by people of various professions.
Objectives: This study aimed to assess the content and quality of the YouTube videos containing information about vitamin D for children.
Material and methods: A YouTube search was performed using the terms ‘vitamin D for children’ and ‘vitamin D deficiency in children’. Two independent reviewers scored the videos with the use of a customized 11-point scoring scheme and the 5-point Global Quality Scale (GQS) to assess the content and quality of each video. The videos were further classified into poor, moderate and good videos. The Kruskal–Wallis and χ2 tests as well as Spearman’s correlation coefficient were used for statistical analysis.
Results: In a total of 120 videos screened, 70 videos were included. They had a median content score of 4 and a median GQS score of 3. According to the information included in the videos and their overall quality, most of the videos were categorized as moderate (n = 33; 47.14% and n = 32; 45.71%, respectively). Good-quality videos had statistically significantly higher content scores as compared to the other groups (p = 0.001). A positive correlation was found between the total content score and the GQS score (ρ = 0.434; p = 0.001).
Conclusions: Most of the videos on YouTube about vitamin D were rated as moderate according to the sufficiency of information, and also their overall quality. This suggests that health organizations need to make further efforts to create good-quality medical content on popular social media platforms, such as YouTube.
Keywords: YouTube™; social media; vitamin D; vitamin D deficiency.