Inquiring Minds Acquiring Wellness: Uses of Online and Offline Sources for Health Information

Abstract

Variation in ability to access and use health information is a key pathway through which social status may impact health. Digital media offer new opportunities for health information seeking, potentially lowering barriers to such content. Using a data set with nuanced information about what sources a diverse group of college students consults for different types of health material, coupled with detailed measures of Internet experiences, this article explores factors related to where young adults turn for health content. Results suggest considerable sex differences in practices across sources of health information. We also find differences in Hispanic students' actions based on parents' country of origin across sources. Finally, challenging assumptions about the universal savvy of young adults, findings suggest that those who are more highly skilled with the Internet are more likely to use it for health information seeking, and Internet experiences are especially important for explaining who turns to online discussions in this realm. Our findings not only contribute to a better understanding of health information seeking and health inequality, but also point to possible sites of intervention to ameliorate health disparities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article would not have been possible without a generous grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a Google Research Award. The authors appreciate the assistance of Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Jessica Diamond with data collection and of the undergraduate research assistants of the Web Use Project group in 2009 for data entry. The helpful support of Ann Feldman and Tom Moss is kindly acknowledged. The second author also thanks the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for its support.

Notes

The authors' names appear alphabetically, with each author having contributed equally to the article.

¹Although about a quarter of Americans remain offline (e.g., Zhang, Callegaro, & Thomas, 2008), we focus less on this core first-level digital divide and, rather, explore how those who do use the Internet utilize it differently for health matters, all the while recognizing that lacking access to the Internet has the potential to disadvantage people further.

²The survey included a verification question to assess whether students were paying attention to the questionnaire: “The purpose of this question is to assess your attentiveness to question wording. For this question please mark the ‘Very often’ response.” The instrument included five possible response options: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, and Very often. We exclude from the study a small portion of students, 4.5% or 52 respondents, who did not choose “Very often” in response to this verification question. The 1,115 students represent those who answered the question correctly.

³We would expect the effects of generation status to be most visible with those students who had both parents born in Latin America or Mexico, as opposed to those with “mixed parentage.” Thus we restricted the category to the former.

⁴Although income data are generally preferable for operationalizing socioeconomic status, with a group of college students such measures are hard to obtain and interpret. Students often do not have income of their own and cannot reliably assess the income of their parents. Additionally, household income is a complicated measure when a large proportion of respondents (43%) live with roommates.

⁵Because these variables do not load on one factor, however, we opted against creating an index of the three. Cronbach's α = .43.