JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Internet is widely accessible and well accepted by young people, however, there is a limited understanding of the Internet usage patterns and characteristics on issues related to the health problems. The contents posted on the online health communities (OHCs) are valuable resources to learn youth's health information needs.

Objective:

In this study, we concurrently exploit statistical analysis and topic analysis of online health information to explore the distribution, impact factors and topics of interests to Chinese young people.

Methods:

We collect 60,478 health-related data posted by young people from a well-known Chinese online health community (OHC) named xywy.com. Descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis are applied to find the distribution and influence factors of the information needs from Chinese young people. Furthermore, a general four-step topic mining strategy is presented for sparse short texts, including sentence vectorization, dimension reduction, clustering and key-word generation.

Results:

(1) Chinese young people's online health information needs are mainly in the areas of gynecology and obstetrics, internal medicine, dermatology, plastic surgery, and surgery successively. (2) The majority of young users in Chinese OHC is female youth over 18 years old, while the gender and age are important influence factors. (3) The information needs mainly focus on treatment, symptoms, etiology, pathology, and diet, whereas there are significant differences among different disease types.

Conclusions:

We make comprehensive analyses to discover the online health information needs of Chinese young people. The research findings are of great practical value to carry out health education and health knowledge dissemination inside and outside schools according to the attention of youth, enable the innovation of information services in OHCs, and improve the health literacy of young people.