INSIGHTS INTO INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR AND QUALITY QUESTIONS IN ONLINE Q&A COMMUNITIES FOR PATIENTS WITH MULTIMORBIDITY.

Abstract

There is an increasing population of health information consumers (HIC) with multiple chronic conditions (multimorbidity). Online questioning and answering (Q&A) sites have emerged as an alternative source for serving the information needs of HIC. Previous studies have explored the online behavior of HIC in general or HIC with a specific disease; however, the research on the behaviors of multimorbid HIC remains limited. Despite the number of studies concerning the analysis of user-generated content in online Q&A sites, there is an insufficient understanding of disease complexity and Q&A sites types and little research devoted to questions that involve multiple diseases. The focus of this dissertation research is on the online behavior of HIC with multimorbidity. Specifically, I aim to explore the online interaction and information seeking behaviors of multimorbid HIC across different types of Q&A sites. This research aims to add to the current literature by examining health information seeking needs, stages of disease development, and types of information shared across different types of Q&A sites and at different levels of disease complexity. Finally, this research aims to investigate the distinctive features of quality questions posted in Q&A sites inform the content and language perspectives. Using kidney disease, a prevalent disease with high likelihood of multimorbidity as a case, I analyze the online interaction behaviors of HIC with multimorbidity in Quora, and information seeking behaviors and health questions collect from Yahoo! Answers and WebMD. The findings of the dissertation research offer multifold scientific contributions to the growing literature on health information seeking, multimorbidity and question quality. In addition, the findings have implications for the design of online Q&A sites to better support health information seeking for multimorbid HIC.