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Health information consumers and patients increasingly take an active
role in seeking health information online and in sharing their health
problems and concerns in online support groups and social media venues.
However, they may risk being influenced by unreliable and misleading
information in such environments, as no intermediaries monitor the quality
of this information. This study focuses on evaluating the quality of health
information exchanged in one of the social media venues, by investigating
how librarians, nurses, and users assessed the quality of health answers in
Yahoo! Answers, a social question-and-answering (Q&A) service. Through
statistical analysis differences among the three participant groups, how
the background characteristics influenced their assessments, and the
relationships between characteristics of the content of answers and quality
evaluation criteria were each considered in detail. Librarians and nurses
shared similar ratings of answer quality, but had differences in their
level of medical knowledge and the types of services they offer, resulting
in minor differences across criteria. Users perceived the quality of health
answers in social Q&A to be higher than librarians and nurses for almost
all criteria. Depending on the sources of information presented in health
answers, librarians, nurses, and users gave different quality assessments.
Implications exist for research into and practice of evaluating the quality
of health information, which need to address both search and domain
expertise along with the sharing of socioemotional values preferred by
users.
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