Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 23, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 15, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Explaining Online Information Seeking Behaviors in Health and Illness: Findings of a Representative German Survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Worldwide the Internet is an increasingly important channel for health information. However, relatively few general health information seeking models are applied to explain online health information seeking behaviors (O-HISB), with each model integrating a different set of potential factors. Another shortcoming of theories explaining (O-)HISB is that most existing models, so far, focus on very specific health contexts like cancer. Therefore, the assumptions of the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model as latest, integrative model are applied to study O-HISB, because this model identifies the general cognitive and sociopsychological factors that explain health information seeking intention. We shift away from single diseases and explore cross-thematic patterns of O-HISB intention, but compare influencing patterns with regard to different health conditions as it can be assumed that groups of people perceiving themselves as ill or healthy will differ with regard their drivers of O-HISB.
Objective:
The objective of our study is to contribute to the development of the concept of O-HISB with regard to two areas. First, we aim to explore individual-level influencing factors of individuals’ O-HISB intention by applying postulates of the PRISM. Second, we compare relevant predictors of O-HISB in groups of people with different health conditions in order to identify cross-thematic central patterns of O-HISB.
Methods:
Interview data from a representative sample of German Internet users (n = 822) serve to explain O-HISB intentions and influencing patterns in different groups of people. The applicability of the PRISM to O-HISB intention was tested by structural equation modeling and multigroup comparison.
Results:
Our results reveal PRISM to be an effective framework for explaining O-HISB intention. For O-HISB, attitudes towards seeking health information online provide the most important explanatory power followed by risk perceptions and affective risk responses. The multigroup comparison revealed differences both regarding the explanatory power of the model and the relevance of influencing factors of O-HISB. The O-HISB intention can be better explained for people facing a health threat suggesting that the influencing factors adopted from PRISM are more suitable to explain a problem-driven type of information seeking behavior.
Conclusions:
The results indicate that attitudes towards seeking health information online and risk perceptions are of central importance for O-HISB across different health-conditional contexts. Influencing factors like self-efficacy and perceived knowledge insufficiency play a context-dependent role – they are more influential when individuals are facing health threats and the search for health information is of higher personal relevance and urgency. These findings can be understood as a first step to develop a generalized theory of O-HISB.
Citation
