University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
J Aging Health. 2012 Apr;24(3):525-41. doi: 10.1177/0898264311428167. Epub 2011 Dec 20.
The Internet holds great potential to support information gathering and decision making surrounding health education and self-care. Older adults, however, underutilize the Internet for health information searches relative to younger adults. The goal of the present study was to examine age differences in the role of trust and ease of search in predicting whether or not individuals use (adopters) or do notuse (nonadopters) the Internet to search for health information.
We used logistic regressions todetermine whether there were age differences in the extent to which trust and ease of search predicted online health information searches within a nationally-representative sample of 3796 adults from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS).
Adopters were more trusting of Internet health informationthan nonadopters. However, a significant age by trust interaction indicated that this difference increased in magnitude with age, a pattern that held even after controlling for demographic and health variables.
Older adults may benefit from special instructions designed to boost Internet trust, for example, learning how to distinguish between high and low quality health-related websites.
互联网在支持健康教育和自我保健相关的信息收集和决策方面具有巨大潜力。然而，与年轻人相比，老年人在利用互联网搜索健康信息方面的使用率较低。本研究的目的是探讨信任和搜索便利性在预测个体是否使用（使用者）或不使用（非使用者）互联网搜索健康信息方面的作用中是否存在年龄差异。
我们使用逻辑回归来确定在全国代表性样本（来自健康信息国家趋势调查（HINTS）的 3796 名成年人）中，信任和搜索便利性在多大程度上预测在线健康信息搜索方面是否存在年龄差异。
使用者比非使用者更信任互联网健康信息。然而，信任的显著年龄交互作用表明，这种差异随着年龄的增长而增大，即使在控制了人口统计学和健康变量后，这种模式仍然存在。
老年人可能受益于旨在提高互联网信任的特殊指导，例如，学习如何区分高质量和低质量的与健康相关的网站。
