How Women With Mental Health Conditions Evaluate the Quality of Information on Mental Health Web sites: A Qualitative Approach

Abstract

One of the primary purposes of using the Web is to find health information for personal health conditions and for the health conditions of care recipients. Women use the Web to find health information more so than men. Information on many health topics is available online. However, many studies have shown that the quality of content on health information Web sites is poor. The narrow focus of quality rating instruments that assess the content quality of health Web sites solely on the basis of adherence to clinical treatment guidelines is called into question. Web user-defined quality criteria obtained from observational studies offer a more realistic perspective. Semistructured interviews on health information seeking on the Web conducted with five women who have chronic mental health conditions demonstrate that several criteria to assess the reliability of online health information are utilized during online searching. The key criteria for quality assessment are the comprehensiveness, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and currency of health information on mental health Web sites. Hospital librarians can play a key role to ensure that mental health patients have access to consumer health information that meets these criteria for reliability, both through the provision of instruction on the selection high-quality information resources to mental health patients and their caregivers and through the development of a comprehensive list of high-quality mental health information resources hosted on the hospital's Web site and available as a handout in the hospital library. Furthermore, hospital librarians should be actively involved in conducting studies of online information use by patients.