The
European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has published a literature review providing an overview of online health information-seeking behaviour among European adults from the perspective of both the
health consumer and the
health professional.
Note some highlights from the report:
"..the wealth of information available [on the Internet] means that ‘healthcare professionals are increasingly finding that they have more information available than they can handle with confidence in their busy time schedules’ and ‘the hardest task now is to actually locate the information required from the flood of information received’. The literature also highlights the difficulty of identifying and filtering the most useful, accurate and credible sources while searching online for health information."
"In a study in the
British Medical Journal, researchers also found that,
out of 26 medical situations investigated 'Google searches found the correct diagnoses in 15 of the cases’", calling for caution if using Google (or any other general internet search engine) to search for a diagnosis.
Click on the post title for access to the 12 page PDF:
"Literature review on health information-seeking behaviour on the web: a health consumer and health professional perspective" ~ ECDC Technical reports(Oct 2011).
Labels: credibility of information, ECDC, information literacy, information seeking behaviour, internet users research, medical information search
Face-to-Face vs. Facebook
For our plugged-in, internet savvy, Gen Y's the question arises; when it comes to the bigger, deeper emotional issues are you going to seek therapy online or are you still going to prefer face-to-face therapy?
Our very own professor
Dr. Vickie Rogers set out to determine the response from a perspective that had not been previously studied, that of the
psychiatric nurse.
"The purpose of this study was to compare differences in emotional self-disclosure between young adult Internet users who prefer face-to-face therapy to those who prefer Internet therapy. A convenience sample of 328 was recruited from Facebook to complete an online survey. A total of 263 preferred face-to-face therapy (F2FT) while 65 preferred Internet therapy (IT). Significant differences were found with the F2FT group willing to disclose emotions of depression, jealously, anxiety, and fear to a therapist more frequently than the IT group. The majority reported a preference for F2FT over IT." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
This study provides an important first step to determine the emotional self-disclosure differences and preferences in our young adult population. Given the high number of participants that reported a history of therapy, a need for psychiatric nurses to reach out with new ways to deliver therapy to better serve these clients, seems warranted.
Full-text of the article was published in October in the journal, Issues in Mental Health Nursing, and is available on Reserve in the Library.Citation: Rogers, V., Griffin, M., Wykle, M., & Fitzpatrick, J. (2009). Internet versus Face-to-Face Therapy: Emotional Self-Disclosure Issues for Young Adults.
Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 30(10), 596-602. doi:10.1080/01612840903003520.
Labels: communication, F2FT, face-to-face therapy, Generation Y, Internet therapy, internet users research, mental health nursing, psychiatric nursing, self-disclosure, young adults attitudes
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has published a literature review providing an overview of online health information-seeking behaviour among European adults from the perspective of both the health consumer and the health professional.
