Physician Trust Moderates the Internet Use and Physician Visit Relationship

Abstract

Prior research found that Internet use for health information leads to more frequent physician visits. This study explores the conditions under which this effect works by examining whether trust in health information from health professionals plays a moderating role in the associations between Internet use and the frequency of physician visits. This study uses a two-wave panel dataset with a U.S. nationally representative sample gathered in 2005 and 2006. The results show that the effects of Internet use on physician visits are larger for those who have low levels of trust in both cross-sectional and panel analyses.

We are grateful to Annice Eu-Shin Kim, Young Kwang Chae, and Amy Leader for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This study was supported under a grant from the National Cancer Institute (5P50CA095856-05). The data were provided by the Annenberg National Health Communication Survey supported, in part, by the Annenberg Trust at Sunnylands.

Notes

¹Additional detailed information is described elsewhere (i.e., Lee, 2008).

²Weights for the U.S. population are available, and are used to verify some results. Use of weights produces inflated standard errors, however, and thus reduces statistical power. This article is meant to test theory; we were willing to sacrifice surer claims of national representativeness to increase the power for, and thus maximize sensitivity to, tests of theory.

³The results for the main effects of Internet use on physician visits are reported in Lee (2008). The main effects of Internet use are also seen in Figures 1 and 2.

⁴The formal ceiling on the physician visits scale was 11 (more than twice a week). The overall observed mean on the scale was between 3 and 4, however, where 3 meant two visits and 4 was four visits a year. The most recent (2004) CDC estimates put mean visits to physicians at 3.55 per year for the entire population (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad374.pdf), adjusted for the age distribution of the ANHCS sample. This suggests that the effective ceiling for this sample is a score between 3 and 4 on the physician visits scale; physician visit frequency may not require more than that.