Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 8, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 7, 2020
Online Health Information Seeking by Parents for their Children: Systematic Review and Agenda for Further Research
ABSTRACT
Background:
Parents commonly use the internet to search for information about their child’s health-related symptoms and guide parental health-related decisions. Despite the impact of parental online health seeking on offline health behaviors, this area of research remains understudied. Previous literature has not adequately distinguished searched behaviors when searching for self or one`s child.
Objective:
The purpose of this review is to examine prevalences and associated variables of parent-child online health information seeking, to investigate parent’s health-related online behavior on how they find, use and evaluate information as well as barriers and concerns that they experience during the search. Based upon this analysis, we develop a conceptual model of potentially important variables of proxy online health information seeking with a focus on building an agenda for further research.
Methods:
We conducted a comprehensive systematic literature review of the PsycInfo, JMIR and PubMED electronic databases. Studies between 1994 and June 2018 were considered. The conceptual model was developed using an inductive mixed-method approach based on the investigated variables in the study sample.
Results:
A total of 33 studies met the inclusion criteria. Findings suggest that parents worldwide are heavy online users of health-related information for their children across highly diverse circumstances. Six studies found high parental health anxiety with prevalences ranging from 14% and 52%. Although parents reported wishing for more guidance from their pediatrician on how to find reliable information, they rarely discussed retrieved information from the web. The conceptual model of proxy online health information seeking includes 49 variables.
Conclusions:
This systematic review identifies important gaps regarding the influence of health-related information on parents’ health behavior and outcomes. Follow up studies are required to offer parents guidance on how to use the web for health purposes in an effective way as well as solutions to the multi-faceted problems during or after online health information seeking for their child. The conceptual model with the number of studies in each model category listed, highlights how previous studies have hardly considered relational variables between the parent and child. An agenda for future research is presented.
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Copyright
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