JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Internet has become one of the most important channels for residents to seek health information, especially in remote rural areas in China.

Objective:

This study aimed to explore the gap between self-rated health information literacy (HIL) and online health information seeking ability for middle-aged patients with chronic diseases in rural community, and to preliminarily evaluate their barriers to seek health information vai Internet.

Methods:

Seventy middle-aged residents with chronic diseases in rural communities near Bengbu City were included in this study. A self-rated questionnaire was used to evlauate theire HIL, three behavioural competency tasks was designed to preliminarily evaluate their ability to seek online health information and a semi-structured interviews was used to investigate their barriers to obtain health information via the Internet. A small audio recorder was used to record the interview content, and a screen-recording software was used to record the participants’ behaviour during the online operational tasks.

Results:

The self-rated HIL scores (mean = 46.2143, SD = 4.8957; total score: 70) of the 70 respondents were moderate. Although there were 91.4% and 92.9% respondents could find health website and information on treatment what they thought was the best, but there still were 35.4% of respondents didn't know how to preserve the results that they had found. The process of operational tasks indicated that most of the articles selected by the respondents came from websites with encyclopaedic knowledge or answers from people based on their experience rather than authoritative health information websites. Combining the results of the semi-structured interviews with the DISCERN scale test results, we found that the majority of respondents over-rated their ability to be aware of, seek, evaluate, and apply online health information.

Conclusions:

Although the level of HIL of rural chronic disease patients was moderate, there was still a large gap between their self-rate HIL and actual ability to access online health information. The vast majority of the respondents recognized the importance of accessing health information but were not very proactive in accessing health information. In addition, most respondents lacked the skills to screen for high-quality online information.