How Do Consumers Acquire Health Information? A Pattern Analysis on Online Health Consultation

摘要

Nowadays, consumers can conveniently access and use health information from online health consultation platforms. It is important to identify the patterns of consumers' multi-source health information acquisition in the circumstance of online health consultation. However, little research has been done in this area. Focusing on such a target, data from an online health consultation platform was taken as an example. 869 cases from the platform were crawled, and a grounded theory research methodology was adopted. According to the coding results, the author found eight patterns of consumers' health information acquisition. This study broadens our understanding of the behavioral pattern of attaining multi-source health information, enriching the field of health information search behavior.