Influences, usage, and outcomes of Internet health information searching: Multivariate results from the Pew surveys

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Summary

This paper provides results from seven major nationally representative datasets (two in detail) from the Pew Internet and American Life Project to answer two primary questions: (1) what influences people to seek online health information and (2) what influences their perceived outcomes from having access to this information? Cross-tabulations, logistic regressions, and multidimensional scaling are applied to these survey datasets. The strongest and most consistent influences on ever, or more frequently, using the Internet to search for health information were sex (female), employment (not fulltime), engaging in more other Internet activities, more specific health reasons (diagnosed with new health problem, ongoing medical condition, prescribed new medication or treatment), and helping another deal with health issues. Internet health seeking is consistently similar to general Internet activities such as email, news, weather, and sometimes hobbies. A variety of outcomes from or positive assessments of searching for Internet health information are predicted most strongly by sex (female), engaging in other Internet activities, Internet health information seeking including more frequent health seeking, more specific health reasons, belonging to an online support group sharing health interests, and helping another deal with an illness or major health condition.

Section snippets

Usage

Even in 1997, in what appears to be the earliest national random survey comparing users to non-users regarding healthcare, 41% of US Internet users had gone online to access healthcare information resources [3], [4]. Based on Pew Internet and American Life reports, the percent of Internet users has risen from around 50% in mid-2000 to around 60% by the end of 2002; the percent of those users who had ever sought health information online has risen from about 55% to about 66%; the percent of

Goals and method

The general goal of the following analyses is to identify more precisely the influences on both online health information seeking, on reported benefits from such health seeking, and similarities among Internet activities, than the descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation results provided by the Pew reports. Because the Pew reports provide descriptive and cross-tabulation results, this paper provides four succinct summary analyses on the two datasets.

(1) Cross-tabulations and other bivariate

Data and measures

This data set combines all the individual rolling surveys for most of the year in 2000 [72]. Nearly two-thirds (62.8%, n = 13 978) of those who responded to the question (“Do you ever go online to access the Internet or World Wide Web or to send and receive email?”) had ever used the Internet. Of those Internet users, 56.3% reported they had sought health information on the Internet (“Do you ever…Look for health or medical information”). A total of 15 reported Internet activities, other than

Data and measures

Five hundred Internet users who go online for health care information were telephone interviewed from 19 June to 6 August 2001 [7]. They were identified from a pre-screened sample of Internet users who in past surveys had identified themselves as seekers of health information on the Internet, with a 54% response rate. Thus, this sample may be biased to the extent that those willing to be interviewed again had different situations or behaviors than those who were originally surveyed and used the

Discussion

This article has summarized results from seven major datasets (two in detail) from the Pew Internet and American Life Project; developed scales from sets of items that represented influences, usage, and outcomes; assessed how health seeking is located multidimensionally among Internet activities; and applied multivariate analyses that controlled for usage and related Internet activities to explain health seeking and outcomes associated with that health seeking. These analyses considerably

Acknowledgement

We thank Lee Rainie, Susannah Fox, and the Pew Internet in American Life Project for making these data available, and James E. Katz for his collaboration and expertise in the larger project. A short version of the basic results were presented at the International Communication Association Conference, New Orleans, May 2004. Although the datasets come from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org), these analyses are completely different from anything provided there.

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