Sbaffi, L. and Zhao, C. (2020) Modeling the online health information seeking process: Information channel selection among university students. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71 (2). pp. 196-207. ISSN 2330-1635
Abstract
This study investigates the influence of individual and information characteristics on university students' information channel selection (that is, search engines, social question & answer sites, online health websites, and social networking sites) of online health information (OHI) for three different types of search tasks (factual, exploratory, and personal experience). Quantitative data were collected via an online questionnaire distributed to students on various postgraduate programs at a large UK university. In total, 291 responses were processed for descriptive statistics, Principal Component Analysis, and Poisson regression. Search engines are the most frequently used among the four channels of information discussed in this study. Credibility, ease of use, style, usefulness, and recommendation are the key factors influencing users' judgments of information characteristics (explaining over 62% of the variance). Poisson regression indicated that individuals' channel experience, age, student status, health status, and triangulation (comparing sources) as well as style, credibility, usefulness, and recommendation are substantive predictors for channel selection of OHI.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of ASIS&T. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Apr 2019 15:55 |
Last Modified: | 23 Nov 2021 13:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/asi.24230 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:145029 |