Open AccessDifferences in Perceptions of Health Information Between the Public and Health Care Professionals: Nonprobability Sampling Questionnaire Survey
Author(s) -
Anat GesserEdelsburg,
Nour Abed Elhadi Shahbari,
Ricky Cohen,
Adva Mir Halavi,
Rana Hijazi,
Galit Paz-Yaakobovitch,
Yael Birman
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
jmir. journal of medical internet research/journal of medical internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.446
H-Index - 142
eISSN - 1439-4456
pISSN - 1438-8871
DOI - 10.2196/14105
Subject(s) - nonprobability sampling , social media , public health , health care , quality (philosophy) , information quality , medicine , perception , psychology , public relations , medical education , family medicine , internet privacy , environmental health , nursing , information system , political science , world wide web , computer science , population , philosophy , epistemology , neuroscience , law
Background In the new media age, the public searches for information both online and offline. Many studies have examined how the public reads and understands this information but very few investigate how people assess the quality of journalistic articles as opposed to information generated by health professionals. Objective The aim of this study was to examine how public health care workers (HCWs) and the general public seek, read, and understand health information and to investigate the criteria by which they assess the quality of journalistic articles. Methods A Web-based nonprobability sampling questionnaire survey was distributed to Israeli HCWs and members of the public via 3 social media outlets: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. A total of 979 respondents participated in the online survey via the Qualtrics XM platform. Results The findings indicate that HCWs find academic articles more reliable than do members of the general public (44.4% and 28.4%, respectively, P <.001). Within each group, we found disparities between the places where people search for information and the sources they consider reliable. HCWs consider academic articles to be the most reliable, yet these are not their main information sources. In addition, HCWs often use social networks to search for information (18.2%, P <.001), despite considering them very unreliable (only 2.2% found them reliable, P <.001). The same paradoxes were found among the general public, where 37.5% ( P <.001) seek information via social networks yet only 8.4% ( P <.001) find them reliable. Out of 6 quality criteria, 4 were important both to HCWs and to the general public. Conclusions In the new media age where information is accessible to all, the quality of articles about health is of critical importance. It is important that the criteria examined in this research become the norm in health writing for all stakeholders who write about health, whether they are professional journalists or citizen journalists writing in the new media.