Does Online Searching Cause or Enforce Health Information Disparity?

Yong-Mi Kim ()
Additional contact information
Yong-Mi Kim: School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma, 4502 E. 41st Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74135, USA

Journal of Information & Knowledge Management (JIKM), 2013, vol. 12, issue 04, 1-10

Abstract: A growing number of people are seeking health information on the Internet. To meet demands, healthcare providers are increasingly disseminating information online. While online health information has enhanced the dissemination of health information and improved people's health-related knowledge, critics posit that such dissemination has widened knowledge disparities in health information and health benefits as a result. Drawing on existing studies, this study identified the main causes of such disparity, namely education, health literacy, computer self-efficacy (CSE) and usage of health-related social media. The finding showed that education resided at the centre of the disparity and impacted other elements. An interesting finding is although individuals possess high levels of CSE, the efficacy does not highly impact their health benefits, meaning that computer does not directly cause health information disparity but is the tool to promote health-related knowledge disparity.

Keywords: Healthcare industry; online health information seeking; health information disparity; social media; computer self-efficacy; health literacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219649213500329
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:jikmxx:v:12:y:2013:i:04:n:s0219649213500329

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219649213500329

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Information & Knowledge Management (JIKM) is currently edited by Professor Suliman Hawamdeh

More articles in Journal of Information & Knowledge Management (JIKM) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().