An evolving user-oriented model of Internet health information seeking

This paper presents an evolving user-oriented model of Internet health information seeking (IS) based on qualitative data collected from 22 lung cancer (LC) patients and caregivers. This evolving model represents information search behavior as more highly individualized, complex, and dynamic than previous models, including pre-search psychological activity, use of multiple heuristics throughout the process, and cost-benefit evaluation of search results. This study's findings suggest that IS occurs in four distinct phases: search initiation/continuation, selective exposure, message processing, and message evaluation. The identification of these phases and the heuristics used within them suggests a higher order of complexity in the decision-making processes that underlie IS, which could lead to the development of a conceptual framework that more closely reflects the complex nature of contextualized IS. It also illustrates the advantages of using qualitative methods to extract more subtle details of the IS process and fill in the gaps in existing models.