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Pregnancy-Related Information Seeking in Online Health Communities: A Qualitative Study

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Diversity, Divergence, Dialogue (iConference 2021)

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Abstract

Pregnancy often imposes risks on women’s health. Consumers are increasingly turning to online resources (e.g., online health communities) to look for pregnancy-related information for better care management. To inform design opportunities for online support interventions, it is critical to thoroughly understand consumers’ information needs throughout the entire course of pregnancy including three main stages: pre-pregnancy, during-pregnancy, and postpartum. In this study, we present a content analysis of pregnancy-related question posts on Yahoo! Answers to examine how they formulated their inquiries, and the types of replies that information seekers received. This analysis revealed 14 main types of information needs, most of which were “stage-based”. We also found that peers from online health communities provided a variety of support, including affirmation of pregnancy, opinions or suggestions, health information, personal experience, and reference to health providers’ service. Insights derived from the findings are drawn to discuss design opportunities for tailoring informatics interventions to support consumers’ information needs at different pregnancy stages.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Dr. Sanghee Oh for sharing the data collected from Yahoo!Answers. This work was supported in part by University of Florida-Florida State University Clinical and Translational Science Award funded by National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences under Award Number UL1TR001427. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA

    Yu Lu, Katherine Min & Zhe He

  2. Pace University, New York, NY, 10038, USA

    Yu Lu & Zhan Zhang

  3. Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Xiao Luo

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  1. Yu Lu
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Correspondence to Yu Lu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Katharina Toeppe

  2. Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Hui Yan

  3. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Samuel Kai Wah Chu

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Lu, Y., Zhang, Z., Min, K., Luo, X., He, Z. (2021). Pregnancy-Related Information Seeking in Online Health Communities: A Qualitative Study. In: Toeppe, K., Yan, H., Chu, S.K.W. (eds) Diversity, Divergence, Dialogue. iConference 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12646. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_2

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