Abstract
BackgroundPeople are increasingly accessing health-related social media sites, such as health discussion forums, to post and read user-generated health information. It is important to know what criteria people use when deciding the relevance of information found on health social media websites, in different situations.ObjectiveThe study attempted to identify the relevance criteria that people use when browsing a health discussion forum, in 3 types of use contexts: when seeking information for their own health issue, when seeking for other people’s health issue, and when browsing without a particular health issue in mind.MethodsA total of 58 study participants were self-assigned to 1 of the 3 use contexts or information needs and were asked to browse a health discussion forum, HealthBoards.com. In the analysis, browsing a discussion forum was divided into 2 stages: scanning a set of post surrogates (mainly post titles) in the summary result screen and reading a detailed post content (including comments by other users). An eye tracker system was used to capture participants’ eye movement behavior and the text they skim over and focus (ie, fixate) on during browsing. By analyzing the text that people’s eyes fixated on, the types of health information used in the relevance judgment were determined. Post-experiment interviews elicited participants’ comments on the relevance of the information and criteria used.ResultsIt was found that participants seeking health information for their own health issue focused significantly more on the poster’s symptoms, personal history of the disease, and description of the disease (P=.01, .001, and .02). Participants seeking for other people’s health issue focused significantly more on cause of disease, disease terminology, and description of treatments and procedures (P=.01, .01, and .02). In contrast, participants browsing with no particular issue in mind focused significantly more on general health topics, hot topics, and rare health issues (P=.01, .01, and .01).ConclusionUsers browsing for their own health issues used mainly case-based relevance criteria to relate the poster's health situation to their own. Participants seeking for others’ issues used mostly general knowledge–based criteria, whereas users with no particular issue in mind used general interest– and curiosity-based criteria.
Highlights
People are increasingly seeking for and accessing health information on the Internet
Content analysis of the data was performed to identify the kinds of information people skimmed over and focused on when making relevance judgments, that is, deciding whether a post contains relevant information to infer the relevance criteria used during the process
The results of the content analysis indicate that the 3 groups of participants focused on different types of health information: participants seeking for their own health issue focused mostly on symptoms, history of disease, and treatment, which can be considered case-based relevance criteria that participants might use to match their own conditions
Summary
People are increasingly seeking for and accessing health information on the Internet. The Pew survey found that among the people who looked for Web-based health information, 942/1778 (53%) had sought information about specific diseases or problems, 764/1778 (43%) for particular medical treatments, 480/1778 (27%) for weight loss and control information, 338/1778 (19%) for food safety information, and 268/1778 (15%) for drug information It is not clear how people decide what health information is relevant for particular purposes (eg, diagnosis) and in different situations and what relevance criteria they use. Objective: The study attempted to identify the relevance criteria that people use when browsing a health discussion forum, in 3 types of use contexts: when seeking information for their own health issue, when seeking for other people’s health issue, and when browsing without a particular health issue in mind. Participants seeking for others’ issues used mostly general knowledge–based criteria, whereas users with no particular issue in mind used general interest– and curiosity-based criteria
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