Trust in health websites

Abstract

As people increasingly turn to health websites for the purposes of self-diagnosis and healthier living, we have an obligation to evaluate the factors that might affect a given user's assessment and their willingness to use such sites. Constructs such as quality, trust, and credibility need to be defined within this space in order for us to truly understand how and why people use health websites. In an effort to better understand these constructs we conducted a comprehensive analysis of all peer-reviewed empirical studies on trust in health websites -- this paper is the result. Work on this topic was provided from eleven fields including HCI, Informatics, Medicine, and Decision Making. Our findings show that authors often value different facets of trust, report different outcomes, and rarely cite each other. Without a coherence of terms and values, the task of presenting and understanding how users trust health information on the web will be intractable.