An Investigation of Online Consumer Health Information Seeking Process of College Students

• Main Authors: Yu-Chen Chang, 張育真
• Other Authors: Shan-Ju Lin CHANG
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62668159724166089964

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 圖書資訊學研究所 === 102 === Recently, more and more users start to seek consumer health information (CHI) on the Internet for managing their own health and making medical decisions. College students are active Internet users, and they also seek health information online. But there are some quality issues regarding online health information that would bring negative effect to the users. So this study aims to understand the online health information seeking behavior of college students, including health information needs, information sources, information evaluation, and information use. We adopted critical incident technique as our research method. There were 40 college students as participants (including bachelor and master) in our study. We divided our research into three stages, including "diary", "online interview", and "semi-constructed interview". First we invited participants to write a diary to describe their previous online health information seeking experience; after they finished the diary, we did a short online interview through e-mail or messenger software to prevent anything unclear and misunderstood; in last stage, we invited 9 participants to join semi-constructed interview, sharing more about their health information seeking experience both in the diary and daily life. According to the study result, health information need of our participants could be divided into two main types: certain health concern and daily information need. Most participants took search engine in the beginning of searching, and others would link to the websites directly without search engine. Every participant used more than one sources, and they would choose the sources based on the characteristics, functions, or personal preference. Participants employed six types of cues to evaluate information quality, including information media cues, information content cues, external support information, social opinion cues, personal knowledge and experience cues, and utility cues. They utilized health information in six ways: evaluating health condition for themselves, following instructions, sharing information, advising families/friends, increasing knowledge, and seeking for medication assistance. Based on our search results, we proposed five suggestions for the health information services: (1) build effective evaluation criteria for health information websites. (2) do search engine optimization for the health information websites. (3) apply more functions and services on the websites, like medical advising system, health information delivery service, and health support social group. (4) well design and present the information contents for the public use. (5) give the online health information literacy instruction, and teach college students how to access health information online with good quality.