How Online Health Forum Users Assess User-Generated Content: Mixed-Method Research

As the Internet becomes an important source for health information, user-centric applications have arisen to empower end-users to self manage their illness. Users are able to share personal experiences in ways that have not been possible through the patient-clinician channel. Online health forums are a type of user-centric platform. In these forums it is difficult to evaluate the credibility of user-generated content because much of the communication is subjective, discursive, experiential and anonymous. Furthermore, users’ capacity to cognitively scrutinise incoming information can be effected by the high stakes or severe consequences of their illness. This work examines how users assess the health information generated by other users. We have used both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how users develop their assessment criteria in judging the credibility of different types of information. Five criteria were discovered in the initial qualitative work. We then quantitatively tested the relationship between those criteria based on two types of information. Our analysis shows that different criteria are used by participants in online health forums for scientific information and experiential information. We used these novel findings to develop a model for how information credibility is assessed in online health forums.