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ABSTRACT
While a number of federal and state websites have been established to intermediate the need for nursing home selection, the brevity of their use by prospective nursing home patients and their families suggests that there may be a way in which highly familiar social media networks may be used to subsidize, complement, or increase the use of more formal online sources of knowledge regarding nursing homes. Preliminary to such a recommendation is the need to characterize the current use of social media sites as a source of nursing home information. This study is designed to initiate inquiry into this research by using Yahoo! Answers, a social media site with significant nursing homes content. The study found that 88.9% (N = 99) of the “askers” sought information on behalf of a mother (29.3%), a father (19.2%), or grandparents (24.3%). Approximately 45% sought information before nursing home placement had occurred and 54% did so for a parent, grandparent, or other who had already been admitted. Relative to the type of information sought, 64.1% sought knowledge-based input, 34.4% involved the need for assurances regarding their proposed actions, and 60.3% solicited the opinions of others regarding some aspect of their nursing home decision-making processes. The analysis also lent specificity to the exact informational needs of Yahoo! Answer users regarding their informational search. Thus, while nursing home consumers use formal websites to seek knowledge regarding nursing home quality, social media websites play a different yet complementary role.
Notes
The number of visitors can be analyzed using a search engine optimization (SEO) tool such as http://www.alexa.com.
The American Association of Retired Persons. http://www.aarp.org
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Darren Liu
Darren Liu, MHA, MS, DrPH is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health, Des Moines University, Iowa. He received his master of biostatistics degree and DrPH from the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Chi-Jung Lu
Chi-Jung Lu, MLIS, PhD is a Qualitative Research Consultant. She received her master’s degree and PhD from the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Betty Burston
Betty Burston, PhD is Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Health Care Administration and Policies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada. She completed her training as an economist at Cornell University and American University. She recently returned to higher education after a 24-year sabbatical.