Older adults' online health information seeking behavior

Authors:
Man Huang;Derek Hansen;Bo Xie
Affiliations:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD;University of Maryland, College Park, MD;University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
Year:
2012

Citing 6
Cited 0

How Students Search for Consumer Health Information on the Web

HICSS '09 Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Lay persons' and professionals' nutrition-related vocabularies and their matching to a general and a specific thesaurus

Journal of Information Science
Making web-based multimedia health tutorials senior-friendly: design and training guidelines

Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Preferences for health information and decision-making: development of the Health Information Wants (HIW) questionnaire

Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Older adults, e-health literacy, and Collaborative Learning: An experimental study

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Experimenting on the impact of learning methods and information presentation channels on older adults' e-health literacy

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Over half of older adult Internet users search for health information online, a number likely to continue to climb. To design a better online environment for older adults, we need to understand how they search for health information online. In an observational study, 17 older adults aged from 56 to 78 completed four health related online search tasks. Through recordings of search activities, "think aloud" audio recorded data, interviews and questionnaires, we identified multiple key issues regarding older adults' search behavior for online health information, including: 1) using insufficient search queries to search for complex search constructs; 2) misunderstanding different Web browser and webpage search tools (e.g., address bar, search bar, webpage search boxes); 3) extensive reliance on prior knowledge in performing searches; and 4) a lack of ability to evaluate the quality of online health information. These findings have implications for developing design and educational interventions for older adults.