Online Health Information Seeking Behavior: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The last five years have seen a leap in the development of information technology and social media. Seeking health information online has become popular. It has been widely accepted that online health information seeking behavior has a positive impact on health information consumers. Due to its importance, online health information seeking behavior has been investigated from different aspects. However, there is lacking a systematic review that can integrate the findings of the most recent research work in online health information seeking, and provide guidance to governments, health organizations, and social media platforms on how to support and promote this seeking behavior, and improve the services of online health information access and provision. We therefore conduct this systematic review. The Google Scholar database was searched for existing research on online health information seeking behavior between 2016 and 2021 to obtain the most recent findings. Within the 97 papers searched, 20 met our inclusion criteria. Through a systematic review, this paper identifies general behavioral patterns, and influencing factors such as age, gender, income, employment status, literacy (or education) level, country of origin and places of residence, and caregiving role. Facilitators (i.e., the existence of online communities, the privacy feature, real-time interaction, and archived health information format), and barriers (i.e., low health literacy, limited accessibility and information retrieval skills, low reliable, deficient and elusive health information, platform censorship, and lack of misinformation checks) to online health information seeking behavior are also discovered.

Keywords: health information consumers; online HISB; online health information seeking behavior; social.

Figure 1

The flowchart of records retrieved, removed, and included.

Figure 2

The number of reviewed papers since 2016.

Figure 3

The research model of Zhang et al. [29]. In this model, health information consumers with different focuses were found to seek different online health information.

Figure 4

The partial research model of Ghahramani and Wang [11]. In this model, online health information seeking behavior was found to mediate the relationship between smartphone use and quality of life.

Figure 5

The research model of Boyce et al. [22]. In this model, online health information seeking behavior was found to be influenced by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and sense of self-worth.