Confidence in Health Searches: Poor Indicator of Good Information
Josh Seidman from The Patient Centered Health Information Technology blog alerted me to the study "Impact of Web Searching and Social Feedback on Consumer Decision Making: A Prospective Online Experiment" published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) 2008 Jan. 22; v. 10 (1) e2. which revealed two interesting findings.
The study revealed that searching high-quality online resources improves consumers’ health knowledge, but a consumers’ degree of "confidence" in their answers is not a good indicator of whether their answers are correct.
By now most librarians are saying, "Well Duh...We know that." But what is interesting is that Josh believes we need a "more rigorous strategy for guiding consumers to high-quality health content," because MLA's and other reputable health organizations' guidelines to consumers have done little to actually guide consumers to accurate health information.
Wow. I don't know what to say about that, perhaps there are some consumer health librarians who might be able to comment.
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 5:34 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I'm not finding the quote you give in this article. I think I would have to agree that just providing access is not enough. It's like the "build it and they will come" mentality that a lot of libraries seem to have. While we try to instruct users on what do to when they use something like MedlinePlus, is this enough? The new format for MedlinePlus ends up giving links in the form of a list that looks like Google results anyway. Wouldn't a user see this as "just like Google" and just use Google?
Just for clarification, the comment I made about MLA and other guidelines was related to empirical research. I apologize that one of the references (http://www.jmir.org/2003/4/e30/HTML) was not previously correct on my post (it's been corrected). Also, I do think that MLA, URAC, etc. provide a good baseline, but the empirical research suggests that they don't give us much information about the actual accuracy & comprehensiveness of the information.
--Josh
Post a Comment
<< Home