Analysis of web information-seeking behavior of users with different levels of health literacy

• Autor(a) principal: Mariana Cláudia Medeiros de Henriques
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/129855
• topic: Ciências da comunicação; Media and communications

Health Literacy is "the level by which individuals can obtain, process, understand and communicate health-related information necessary to make informed health decisions". Users with a low level of health literacy are less aware of their medical conditions, more difficult to follow instructions and understand doctors' information. Increasingly, people turn to the web to search for health information. Low literacy users' difficulties in the real world are likely to continue to exist in the virtual world. The main objective of this study is to analyze the search behavior of users with different levels of health literacy. It intends to identify differences between people with low and high health literacy that can then be used to improve retrieval systems and contribute, among others, to facilitate access to information and education by people with low literacy. This study follows a previous work that included annotating video records of experience with users previously carried out. Based on the preliminary analysis version of the previous work, an event classification scheme was proposed that includes types of interactions related to the browser, search engine, and web pages. Each type of interaction is composed of events that, in turn, are associated with analysis variables. Within this scheme, modules were built to analyze the formulation of search queries. Based on this scheme, the annotation of the videos was revised, and the data analysis was performed in a descriptive and inferential manner. The main results demonstrate that the low health literacy group used mainly the search engine box and the backward feature. On the search engine results page, they clicked more with the left mouse button. On the results page, they spent more time on the interaction, mainly scrolling. On the other hand, the high health literacy group made more use of the address bar and the functionality of selecting the URL text. On the search engine results page, this group made more right-clicks. At the level of reformulations, which occur in the context of the same need for information, users with low health literacy used more "totally new" reformulations, that is, without terms in common with the previous question. In turn, the high health literacy group did more reformulations.