By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.

Objective
The objective of this literature review was to summarise current research regarding how consumers seek health-related information from social media. Primarily, we hope to reveal characteristics of existing studies investigating the health topics that consumers have discussed in social media, ascertaining the roles social media have played in consumers’ information-seeking processes and discussing the potential benefits and concerns of accessing consumer health information in social media.

Methods
The Web of Science Core Collection database was searched for existing literature on consumer health information seeking in social media. The search returned 214 articles, of which 21 met the eligibility criteria following review of full-text documents.

Conclusion
Between 2011 and 2016, twenty-one studies published explored various topics related to consumer information seeking in social media. These ranged from online discussions on specific diseases (e.g. diabetes) to public health concerns (e.g. pesticide residues). Consumers’ information needs vary depending on the health issues of interest. Benefits of health seeking on social media, in addition to filling a need for health information, include the social and emotional support health consumers gain from peer-to-peer interactions. These benefits, however, are tempered by concerns of information quality and authority and lead to decreased consumer engagement.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/hir.12192

Consumer health information seeking in social media: a literature review.

Looking for Information -- A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior by Donald Case

This study used social network theory to explore the role of social support and social networks in health information–seeking behavior among Korean American (KA) adults. A descriptive qualitative study using a web-based online survey was conducted from January 2013 to April 2013 in the U.S. The survey included open-ended questions about health information–seeking experiences in personal social networks and their importance in KA adults. Themes emerging from a constant comparative analysis of the narrative comments by 129 of the 202 respondents were analyzed. The sample consisted of 129 KA adults, 64.7% female, with a mean age of 33.2 (SD = 7.7). Friends, church members, and family members were the important network connections for KAs to obtain health information. KAs looked for a broad range of health information from social network members, from recommendations and reviews of hospitals/doctors to specific diseases or health conditions. These social networks were regarded as important for KAs because there were no language barriers, social network members had experiences similar to those of other KAs, they felt a sense of belonging with those in their networks, the network connections promoted increased understanding of different health care systems of the U.S. system, and communication with these network connections helped enhance feelings of being physically and mentally healthy. This study demonstrates the important role that social support and personal social networks perform in the dissemination of health information for a large ethnic population, KAs, who confront distinct cultural challenges when seeking health information in the U.S. Data from this study also illustrate the cultural factors that influence health information acquisition and access to social support for ethnic minorities. This study provides practical insights for professionals in health information services, namely, that social networks can be employed as a channel for disseminating health information to immigrants.

/pdf/the-role-of-social-support-and-social-networks-in-health-48sx6g7myw.pdf

The role of social support and social networks in health information–seeking behavior among Korean Americans: a qualitative study

Background: The widely known terminology gap between health professionals and health consumers hinders effective information seeking for consumers. Objective: The aim of this study was to better understand consumers’ usage of medical concepts by evaluating the coverage of concepts and semantic types of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) on diabetes-related postings in 2 types of social media: blogs and social question and answer (QA and (2) a total of 58,422 questions and associated answers posted between 2009 and 2014 in the diabetes category of Yahoo! Answers. We analyzed the datasets using a widely adopted biomedical text processing framework Apache cTAKES and its extension YTEX. First, we applied the named entity recognition (NER) method implemented in YTEX to identify UMLS concepts in the datasets. We then analyzed the coverage and the popularity of concepts in the UMLS source vocabularies across the 2 datasets (ie, blogs and social QA4(4):e41]

Consumers’ Use of UMLS Concepts on Social Media: Diabetes-Related Textual Data Analysis in Blog and Social Q&A Sites

Korean Americans tend to have less access to health service and cancer screening tests than all US population. It is necessary to understand their current cancer information-seeking behaviors and information needs to more effectively provide adequate cancer information. However, there is little known about their cancer information seeking behaviors and needs. The purpose of the study was to understand cancer information seeking behaviors and information needs among Korean Americans. Data were collected from MissyUSA, which is one of the biggest websites for the Korean community in the USA. A total of 393 free-texts from January to June 2013 were reviewed; 120 were deleted because the messages were not related to cancer health information. A total of 273 posted free-texts were analyzed for this study, using an open source text-mining software program called AntConc 3.2.4. The extracted terms were categorized based on coding systems, after linguistic variations were handled. Terms such as “surgery,” “breast cancer,” “examination,” “cancer” (unspecified), “Korea,” and “pain” were most frequently identified. Medical topics accounted for 71.4 % of the main topics of the postings. Treatment was the most frequently discussed in the medical topics while in the non-medical category, the most frequently discussed topic was recommendations for hospitals or doctors. In relation to types of cancer, breast cancer was the greatest concern, followed by cervical and liver cancer. The findings from this study can help in establishing more effective strategies to provide better cancer information among Korean Americans by assessing their cancer information seeking trends and information needs.

Cancer information-seeking behaviors and information needs among Korean Americans in the online community.

Cancer information seeking in social question and answer services. Identifying health-related topics in cancer questions on Yahoo! Answers .

Health-related questions users posted on social Q&A sites are a representation of consumers' real-life needs for health information. To tap into this source for a deeper understanding of general people's health information needs and information searching behavior, this poster reports an attempt to develop a coding schema for analyzing disease-related questions in social Q&A sites. The developed schema could serve as a basis for analyzing a wide range of topics in health. It could also guide the implementation of automatic data mining approaches to analyze the vast amount of data generated on social media platforms.

https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/meet.14504901316

Min Sook Park

Papers

Consumers’ Use of UMLS Concepts on Social Media: Diabetes-Related Textual Data Analysis in Blog and Social Q&A Sites

Cancer information-seeking behaviors and information needs among Korean Americans in the online community.

Cancer information seeking in social question and answer services. Identifying health-related topics in cancer questions on Yahoo! Answers .

Health information needs on diseases: A coding schema development for analyzing health questions in social Q&A

United States and South Korean citizens’ interpretation and assessment of COVID-19 quantitative data