Abstract
The Internet has become an important source of health information for elderly people in China. A controlled user experiment was conducted to understand how Chinese elderly people search for online health information. Twenty elderly people completed three search tasks based on three different health information seeking contexts. Online health information seeking behavior patterns of the elderly were found to include reselecting from results pages, following hyperlinks, and using a query reformulation patter. There was no significant difference with respect to emotion and the three task contexts, as elderly people have positive attitudes regarding the health information seeking process, but cognition within the three task contexts displayed significant differences. There was a significant correlation between education and Internet search proficiency regarding task search performance, while health condition, familiarity with the Internet and credibility of online health information were found to be primary factors that influenced the decision of the elderly to search for online health information.
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