Exploration of the Construct of Reliance Among Patients Who Talk with Their Providers About Internet Information

Abstract

Three hundred fifty participants, recruited from Internet health message boards, completed online surveys about their experiences talking with health care providers about Internet health information. Two distinct dimensions of reliance emerged from the data, one regarding the patient's reliance on the health care provider for decision making and the other regarding the patient's reliance on the health care provider to stay healthy. Self-reliant patients tended to be female, have lower incomes, and report less frequent visits to the health care provider than did health-care-provider-reliant patients. Age, comfort level, and frequency of talking about Internet health information were not related to reliance level.

Notes

¹We did change the wording of the items slightly from Makoul's work, most notably being from doctor to health care provider. If that were to have an effect, we expect it would have affected both items; thus, we do not attribute the large difference in standardized means to the word change.

²This is not a perfect comparison, though, for three reasons: (1) We asked about visits to the particular health care provider that the respondent was reporting on, rather than any visit. This may mean our sample's mean is actually underreporting total visits to health care providers. (2) The national average focuses on doctors' visits, while ours focuses more broadly on health care providers in general (though most reported about a doctor). (3) We included participants from outside this country (though most were from the United States).