What sources to rely on? Laypeople’s source selection in online health information seeking

Yu Chi, Daqing He, Shuguang Han, Jie Jiang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, we examined what sources laypeople would select (i.e., visit and adopt) to resolve their health-related information needs, and how different health conditions affect the selection. Twenty-four college students participated in this user study, where they were asked to search for two separate health issues respectively: multiple sclerosis and weight loss. The search logs were collected and analyzed afterwards. We classify the online information sources on both website level and webpage level, and a webpage classification scheme based on genre is proposed. Results suggest that users’ selection of sources depends on different types of health issues in terms of urgency and complexity. Health-specific webpage is a popular source and highly adopted for both tasks, but it is particularly helpful for urgent and complex health conditions. Search engines could facilitate users to navigate among scattered health information and support concerns regarding common health issues.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHIIR 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
Pages233-236
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349253
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 1 2018
Event3rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2018 - New Brunswick, United States
Duration: Mar 11 2018Mar 15 2018

Publication series

NameCHIIR 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
Volume2018-March

Conference

Conference3rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Brunswick
Period3/11/183/15/18

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Association of Computing Machinery.

Keywords

  • Health information seeking
  • Source classification
  • Source selection

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Information Systems

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