JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Online Questioning and Answering (Q&A) sites have emerged as an alternative source for serving individuals’ health information needs. Despite the amount of studies concerning the analysis of user-generated content in online Q&A sites, there is an insufficient understanding of the effect of disease complexity on information seeking needs, and the types of information shared and little research have been devoted to questions that involve multimorbidity.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate online sharing of health information at different levels of disease complexity. In particular, this study gains a deep insight into the effect of disease complexity in terms of information seeking needs, types of information shared, and stages of disease development.

Methods:

We first selected a random sample of 400 questions from each site. The data cleaning resulted in a final set of 624 questions, 316 questions from Yahoo Answers and 308 from WebMD Answers. We used a mixed data approach, including qualitative content analysis followed by statistical quantitative analysis.

Results:

The analysis of variance One Way ANOVA showed significant differences in the disease complexity (single versus multimorbid disease questions) only on two information seeking needs: diagnosis (F1, 622 =5.08 , p<0.01), and treatment (F1, 622 =4.82 ,p<0.05). There were also statistically significant differences between the two levels of disease complexity when considering the stages of disease development, the health stage (F1,622 =48.02, p<0.001) and chronic stage (F1,622 =54.01, p<0.001). Moreover, our findings showed significant differences among the two types of disease complexity on all types of shared information, demographic information (F1,622 =32.24, p<0.01), medical all (F1,622 = 16.75, p<0.01), medical diagnosis (F1,622 =11.04, p<0.01), as well as treatment and prevention (F1,622 =14.55 , p<0.01).

Conclusions:

The findings present implications for designing online Q&A sites to better support health information seeking. Future experimental studies should be conducted to verify these findings and provide effective health information from Q&A sites.