Open Access 01-07-2020 | Affective Disorder | Research
Consumer health information needs in China – a case study of depression based on a Social Q&A community
Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making | Special Issue 3/2020
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Background
The social Q&A community quickly becomes a popular platform for consumers to find health information because of its convenience and interactivity.
Methods
Based on the 10,861 depression questions collected in the Zhihu, the largest Q&A platform in China, we divided the healthy information needs description into nine categories with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We also divided the healthy information needs type into Physiological, affective and cognitive needs based on the Wilson model.
Results
The results show that the largest categories are depression symptom and social activities while the less concerned health information is prevention and medical insurance. More attention is paid to cognitive needs. We also find there is no strong correlation between attention and needs type.
Conclusions
The purpose of this paper is to refine the consumer health information needs types to better understand the consumer health information characteristic in China.