Dubowicz Arthur, Schulz Peter J
Institute of Communication and Health, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland.
Interact J Med Res. 2015 Mar 30;4(1):e8. doi: 10.2196/ijmr.3144.
Most of adult Internet users have searched for health information on the Internet. The Internet has become one of the most important sources for health information and treatment advice. In most cases, the information found is not verified with a medical doctor, but judged by the "online-diagnosers" independently. Facing this situation, public health authorities raise concern over the quality of medical information laypersons can find on the Internet.
The objective of the study was aimed at developing a measure to evaluate the credibility of websites that offer medical advice and information. The measure was tested in a quasi-experimental study on two sleeping-disorder websites of different quality.
There were 45 survey items for rating the credibility of websites that were tested in a quasi-experimental study with a random assignment of 454 participants to either a high- or a low-quality website exposure. Using principal component analysis, the original items were reduced to 13 and sorted into the factors: trustworthiness, textual deficits of the content, interferences (external links on the Web site), and advertisements. The first two factors focus more on the provided content itself, while the other two describe the embedding of the content into the website. The 45 survey items had been designed previously using exploratory observations and literature research.
The final scale showed adequate power and reliability for all factors. The loadings of the principal component analysis ranged satisfactorily (.644 to .854). Significant differences at P<.001 were found between the low- and high-quality groups. Advertisements on the website were rated as disturbing in both experimental conditions, meaning that they do not differentiate between good and bad information.
The scale reliably distinguished high- and low-quality of medical advice given on websites.
大多数成年互联网用户都在网上搜索过健康信息。互联网已成为健康信息和治疗建议的最重要来源之一。在大多数情况下，所找到的信息未经医生核实，而是由“在线诊断者”自行判断。面对这种情况，公共卫生当局对非专业人员在互联网上能找到的医疗信息质量表示担忧。
本研究的目的是开发一种评估提供医疗建议和信息的网站可信度的方法。该方法在一项针对两个不同质量的睡眠障碍网站的准实验研究中进行了测试。
有45个用于评估网站可信度的调查项目，在一项准实验研究中进行了测试，454名参与者被随机分配到高质量或低质量网站组。通过主成分分析，将原始项目减少到13个，并分为以下因素：可信度、内容文本缺陷、干扰因素（网站上的外部链接）和广告。前两个因素更多地关注所提供的内容本身，而另外两个因素描述了内容在网站中的嵌入情况。这45个调查项目此前是通过探索性观察和文献研究设计的。
最终量表对所有因素都显示出足够的效力和可靠性。主成分分析的载荷范围令人满意（0.644至0.854）。在低质量组和高质量组之间发现了P<0.001的显著差异。在两种实验条件下，网站上的广告都被评为令人不安，这意味着它们无法区分好坏信息。
该量表能够可靠地区分网站上提供的医疗建议的高质量和低质量。
