Health information needs and feedback of users in the online TCM community

Lei Nie, Jiayi Xu and Ruojia Wang

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-17

Abstract: To improve the information service quality of the online Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) community, this study investigated users’ information needs, feedback and the relationship between them. Using qualitative content analysis, the basic characteristics of users’ needs were obtained. Logistic regression was used to explore the impact of different need characteristics of feedback. The main findings are as follows: 1) Disease consultation, health preservation, professional discussion, knowledge sharing and experience description are the major 5 types of information needs in the online TCM community; 2) Some users provided TCM-related information, such as the tongue image and the TCM four diagnosis; 3) A total of 78.8% of the posts received effective feedback, and the main types of feedback were answering, discussing, inquiring and emotional supporting; 4) Providing enough information can significantly and positively affect whether needs receive effective feedback, suggesting that users can present information about their condition in as many different formats as possible when articulating their needs.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0301536 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 01536&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0301536

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301536

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().