Information Seeking and Receiving of Older Adults with Diabetes in the Online Health Community: An Information Need Contextualization Perspective

ABSTRACT

Online health communities (OHCs) are important online health communication channels for older adults with diabetes to access health information. When seeking health information, they often disclose a variety of contextual information (e.g., socio-economic situations) in their questions. Selective contextual information disclosure is a type of communication strategy for users in OHCs to elicit replies from others. In this study, we adopted text analysis to investigate what contextual information older adults with diabetes disclose to articulate their information needs and used the fixed-effect Poisson model to examine the relationships between different types of contextual information disclosure and informational support receipt. Our analyses were based on a dataset of 4,505 questions and corresponding replies from an online diabetes community. The results showed that cognitive information is the most frequently disclosed contextual information, while older adults tend to disclose demographic information in their questions less. Providing demographic and situational details in questions can enhance informational support receiving, resulting in an increased number of informational supports. However, disclosing cognitive, affective, informational channels, or support information does not significantly affect the informational support receiving. These findings can contribute to extending our existing understanding of information seekers’ communication strategies in OHCs.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the senior editor Angela Cooke-Jackson and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2349314

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [number JBK2304124], partly supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [number 22&ZD328], partly supported by the Beijing Municipal Social Science Fund [number 22SRA002], and partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [number 72201269].