Priest Chad, Knopf Amelia, Groves Doyle, Carpenter Janet S, Furrey Christopher, Krishnan Anand, Miller Wendy R, Otte Julie L, Palakal Mathew, Wiehe Sarah, Wilson Jeffrey
Social Network Health Research Laboratory at the Indiana University School of Nursing, School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, United States.
J Med Internet Res. 2016 Mar 9;18(3):e44. doi: 10.2196/jmir.5033.
The development of effective health care and public health interventions requires a comprehensive understanding of the perceptions, concerns, and stated needs of health care consumers and the public at large. Big datasets from social media and question-and-answer services provide insight into the public's health concerns and priorities without the financial, temporal, and spatial encumbrances of more traditional community-engagement methods and may prove a useful starting point for public-engagement health research (infodemiology).
The objective of our study was to describe user characteristics and health-related queries of the ChaCha question-and-answer platform, and discuss how these data may be used to better understand the perceptions, concerns, and stated needs of health care consumers and the public at large.
We conducted a retrospective automated textual analysis of anonymous user-generated queries submitted to ChaCha between January 2009 and November 2012. A total of 2.004 billion queries were read, of which 3.50% (70,083,796/2,004,243,249) were missing 1 or more data fields, leaving 1.934 billion complete lines of data for these analyses.
Males and females submitted roughly equal numbers of health queries, but content differed by sex. Questions from females predominantly focused on pregnancy, menstruation, and vaginal health. Questions from males predominantly focused on body image, drug use, and sexuality. Adolescents aged 12-19 years submitted more queries than any other age group. Their queries were largely centered on sexual and reproductive health, and pregnancy in particular.
The private nature of the ChaCha service provided a perfect environment for maximum frankness among users, especially among adolescents posing sensitive health questions. Adolescents' sexual health queries reveal knowledge gaps with serious, lifelong consequences. The nature of questions to the service provides opportunities for rapid understanding of health concerns and may lead to development of more effective tailored interventions.
有效的医疗保健和公共卫生干预措施的制定需要全面了解医疗保健消费者和广大公众的看法、担忧及明确需求。社交媒体和问答服务产生的大数据集能洞察公众的健康担忧和优先事项，且不受传统社区参与方法所面临的资金、时间和空间限制，可能成为公众参与健康研究（信息传播流行病学）的有用起点。
我们研究的目的是描述ChaCha问答平台的用户特征和与健康相关的问题，并讨论如何利用这些数据更好地理解医疗保健消费者和广大公众的看法、担忧及明确需求。
我们对2009年1月至2012年11月提交给ChaCha的匿名用户生成问题进行了回顾性自动文本分析。共读取了20.04亿个问题，其中3.50%（70,083,796/2,004,243,249）缺少1个或更多数据字段，剩余19.34亿条完整数据行用于这些分析。
男性和女性提交的健康问题数量大致相等，但内容因性别而异。女性提出的问题主要集中在怀孕、月经和阴道健康方面。男性提出的问题主要集中在身体形象、药物使用和性方面。12至19岁的青少年提交的问题比其他任何年龄组都多。他们的问题主要集中在性健康和生殖健康方面，尤其是怀孕问题。
ChaCha服务的私密性为用户，尤其是提出敏感健康问题的青少年提供了一个极为坦诚的完美环境。青少年的性健康问题揭示了存在严重且会影响一生后果的知识差距。向该服务提出的问题的性质为快速了解健康担忧提供了机会，并可能促成更有效的针对性干预措施的制定。
