Cancer Information-Seeking Behaviors and Information Needs Among Korean Americans in the Online Community

Abstract

Korean Americans tend to have less access to health service and cancer screening tests than all US population. It is necessary to understand their current cancer information-seeking behaviors and information needs to more effectively provide adequate cancer information. However, there is little known about their cancer information seeking behaviors and needs. The purpose of the study was to understand cancer information seeking behaviors and information needs among Korean Americans. Data were collected from MissyUSA, which is one of the biggest websites for the Korean community in the USA. A total of 393 free-texts from January to June 2013 were reviewed; 120 were deleted because the messages were not related to cancer health information. A total of 273 posted free-texts were analyzed for this study, using an open source text-mining software program called AntConc 3.2.4. The extracted terms were categorized based on coding systems, after linguistic variations were handled. Terms such as "surgery," "breast cancer," "examination," "cancer" (unspecified), "Korea," and "pain" were most frequently identified. Medical topics accounted for 71.4 % of the main topics of the postings. Treatment was the most frequently discussed in the medical topics while in the non-medical category, the most frequently discussed topic was recommendations for hospitals or doctors. In relation to types of cancer, breast cancer was the greatest concern, followed by cervical and liver cancer. The findings from this study can help in establishing more effective strategies to provide better cancer information among Korean Americans by assessing their cancer information seeking trends and information needs.