ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2008
Impact of web searching and social feedback on consumer decision making: a prospective online experiment.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Double-Edged Sword: Quality and Credibility of Colon Cancer Screening Content on YouTube.Cureus · 2024Article
- Article
- Re-envisioning Digital Equity and Connection Literacy for Older Adults.North Carolina medical journal · 2023Article
- A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Enhance Health Care Community-Based Question Answering: A Case Study in Alcoholism.JMIR medical informatics · 2016Article
- SimQ: real-time retrieval of similar consumer health questions.Journal of medical Internet research · 2015Article
- Tweet content related to sexually transmitted diseases: no joking matter.Journal of medical Internet research · 2014Article
- Identifying Measures Used for Assessing Quality of YouTube Videos with Patient Health Information: A Review of Current Literature.Interactive journal of medical research · 2013Article
- Interaction patterns of nurturant support exchanged in online health social networking.Journal of medical Internet research · 2012Article
- How online crowds influence the way individual consumers answer health questions: an online prospective study.Applied clinical informatics · 2011Article
- Paradigm shift or annoying distraction: emerging implications of web 2.0 for clinical practice.Applied clinical informatics · 2010Article
- Is relevance relevant? User relevance ratings may not predict the impact of Internet search on decision outcomes.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIAArticle
- Exploiting domain information for Word Sense Disambiguation of medical documents.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIAArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe World Wide Web has increasingly become an important source of information in health care consumer decision making. However, little is known about whether searching online resources actually improves consumers' understanding of health issues.
objectivesThe aim was to study whether searching on the World Wide Web improves consumers' accuracy in answering health questions and whether consumers' understanding of health issues is subject to further change under social feedback.
methodsThis was a pre/post prospective online study. A convenience sample of 227 undergraduate students was recruited from the population of the University of New South Wales. Subjects used a search engine that retrieved online documents from PubMed, MedlinePlus, and HealthInsite and answered a set of six questions (before and after use of the search engine) designed for health care consumers. They were then presented with feedback consisting of a summary of the post-search answers provided by previous subjects for the same questions and were asked to answer the questions again.
resultsThere was an improvement in the percentage of correct answers after searching (pre-search 61.2% vs post-search 82.0%, P <.001) and after feedback with other subjects' answers (pre-feedback 82.0% vs post-feedback 85.3%, P =.051). The proportion of subjects with highly confident correct answers (ie, confident or very confident) and the proportion with highly confident incorrect answers significantly increased after searching (correct pre-search 61.6% vs correct post-search 95.5%, P <.001; incorrect pre-search 55.3% vs incorrect post-search 82.0%, P <.001). Subjects who were not as confident in their post-search answers were 28.5% more likely than those who were confident or very confident to change their answer after feedback with other subjects' post-search answers (chi(2) (1)= 66.65, P <.001).
conclusionsSearching across quality health information sources on the Web can improve consumers' accuracy in answering health questions. However, a consumer's confidence in an answer is not a good indicator of the answer being correct. Consumers who are not confident in their answers after searching are more likely to be influenced to change their views when provided with feedback from other consumers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.