Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Mar 05, 2026)
Date Submitted: Sep 22, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
How do patients with inflammatory bowel disease perceive e-health literacy? Revealing diverse perspectives through Q methodology
ABSTRACT
Background:
Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic disease that is increasingly prevalent worldwide, affecting the quality of life of patients and creating an urgent need for health management. However, traditional health management models are difficult to meet these needs, prompting a shift towards digital health management. E-health literacy, defined as the ability to obtain, evaluate, and apply online health information, plays a crucial role in digital health management. Currently, there is a lack of research on e-health literacy among IBD patients, and the issue of group heterogeneity is often overlooked. The Q method can identify patient cognitive patterns and subgroups in digital health management.
Objective:
The Q method was adopted to explore the diverse cognitive perspectives of IBD patients on e-health literacy.
Methods:
The study employed the Q method, recruiting 120 IBD patients and analyzing them through PQMethod software to identify patient subgroups.
Results:
Factor analysis identified four significant factors: professional-social-resource-driven technology troublemakers, technology-dependent-privacy-anxiety-compromised pragmatists, cautious authority information integrators, and tradition-oriented technology-assisted communicators.
Conclusions:
The electronic health literacy of patients with IBD shows significant heterogeneity. This study is the first to reveal the digital health management needs of IBD patients through the Q method, providing a reference basis for digital health management and having significant clinical translational value.
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