Share to Seek: The Effects of Disease Complexity on Health Information–Seeking Behavior

Background Web-based question and answer (Q&A) sites have emerged as an alternative source for serving individuals’ health information needs. Although a number of studies have analyzed user-generated content in web-based Q&A sites, there is insufficient understanding of the effect of disease complexity on information-seeking needs and the types of information shared, and little research has been devoted to the questions concerning multimorbidity. Objective This study aims to investigate seeking of health information in Q&A sites at different levels of disease complexity. Specifically, this study investigates the effects of disease complexity on information-seeking needs, types of information shared, and stages of disease development. Methods First, we selected a random sample of 400 questions separately from each of the Q&A sites: Yahoo Answers and WebMD Answers. The data cleaning resulted in a final set of 624 questions from the two sites. We used a mixed methods approach, including qualitative content analysis and quantitative statistical analysis. Results The one-way results of ANOVA showed significant effects of disease complexity (single vs multimorbid disease questions) on two information-seeking needs: diagnosis ( F 1,622 =5.08; P =.02) and treatment ( F 1,622 =4.82; P =.02). There were also significant differences between the two levels of disease complexity in two stages of disease development: the general health stage ( F 1,622 =48.02; P <.001) and the chronic stage ( F 1,622 =54.01; P <.001). In addition, our results showed significant effects of disease complexity across all types of shared information: demographic information ( F 1,622 =32.24; P <.001), medical diagnosis ( F 1,622 =11.04; P <.001), and treatment and prevention ( F 1,622 =14.55; P <.001). Conclusions Our findings present implications for the design of web-based Q&A sites to better support health information seeking. Future studies should be conducted to validate the generality of these findings and apply them to improve the effectiveness of health information in Q&A sites.