Contextualizing consumer health information searching

Abstract

The existing research on consumer health information searching has focused on types of information that users need concerning a particular disease and their querying behavior in general search engines. The context of health information searching, such as people's goals, motivations, and emotions, has received comparatively little attention. Given the significant impact of context on the result of information searching, this study sets out to explore contextual factors of consumer health information searching by analyzing health-related questions that people posted on Yahoo Answers, a social Q&A site. Particularly, we looked at the following factors: linguistic features of the questions that users formulated, their motivations for asking the questions, the time when the questions were asked, and their cognitive representations of the problem space. The results could improve our understanding of consumer health information searching and provide implications for the design of general-purpose health information search engines and consumer health information systems.

Supporting Families in Reviewing and Communicating about Radiology Imaging Studies

“…Our decision to focus on questions is supported by Zhang's [37] definition of questions in the context of consumer health information searching: a "manifestation of a person's information need arising from an intention to fulfill his or her knowledge gaps." Thus, we treat questions in online health communities as posters' attempts to resolve knowledge gaps resulting from technical medical language used in radiology reports.…”

“…Growing evidence suggests that patients are increasingly interested in timely, easy, and full access to all personal health data [29,30,37]. Following the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 [13], healthcare organizations have begun to increase access to medical imaging data through personal health record technology such as online patient portals, so as to provide all diagnostic health data in the patient's electronic medical record.…”

MilkQA: A Dataset of Consumer Questions for the Task of Answer Selection

“…Recent research on answer selection models has been focused on objective and well-formed factoids, while little attention has been given to other kinds of questions, such as consumer questions [1], [2], which are a common form of seeking information that usually occurs in Q&A community sites, forums and customer services.…”

“…Occasionally, the context is not given explicitly, and the consumer question is posed as a sequence of interrelated, complementary sub-questions. Another noticeable characteristic of this kind of question is that sub-questions are often posed as declarative sentences beginning with "I would like to know" [1], instead of direct interrogative sentences.…”

“…They often contain misspelings, poor punctuation, and layman's terms that do not match the vocabulary of potential answers [1], [2]. Context descriptions commonly contain details in excess, which make it hard to distinguish information that is really relevant [3].…”