Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 17, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 24, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 26, 2020
Online Health Information Seeking Behavior of Children and Adolescents Aged from 12 to 14 Years – A Mixed-Methods Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Many children are surrounded by smartphones, tablets and computers and nearly all of them know how to use them for an internet search on any topic. However, almost none of the children know how to select the proper and correct information. This can become problematic when health issues are concerned where it is vital to classify the information as incorrect, wrong or even dangerous.
Objective:
The aim of the present study was to assess, how children and adolescents rate their online health literacy, how their actual literacy differs from their rating, how their performance is related to their self-efficacy, which websites they visit, what the quality of these websites is and finally if it is possible to increase their online health literacy in a workshop.
Methods:
A workshop with a focus on health literacy was attended by 14 children and adolescents in an Austrian secondary school. After a prior assessment (CFT 20-R, LGVT 6-12, eHEALS, WIRKALL_r), the students were asked to do an internet-based search on a health-related issue. The browser histories and screenshots of all internet researches were gathered, clustered and evaluated. After the workshop, the health literacy of the students was assessed again, by using the eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS).
Results:
The analysis showed that the participants assessed their online health literacy much better than it actually was. Furthermore, those who had rated themselves better did not visit websites of higher quality than the others. Fourteen participants opened a total of 85 homepages but only 8 of them were rated as good or fair by an independent rating. Further, the online health literacy correlated with the self-efficacy of the participants (r (12) = .794, P = .002).
Conclusions:
Our study showed that a targeted improvement of health literacy is urgently needed, especially among children and adolescents and that it is possible to draw the attention of students to critical aspects of internet search as well as to slightly improve their competence in a workshop. Further investigations in this area with larger set of data, perhaps with the help of a computer program, are urgently needed.
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