A Multimodal Analysis of Online Information Foraging in Health-Related Topics Based on Stimulus-Engagement Alignment:...

Area of Science:

• Information Science
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Online health information seeking has increased, necessitating user evaluation of content quality.
• Assessing online information quality requires considering both content and user appraisal abilities.
• Few studies simultaneously address content quality and user evaluation in organic web search.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a method bridging content quality and user appraisal in online information seeking.
• To introduce stimulus-engagement alignment (SEA) as a novel approach to studying information foraging theory.
• To compare novices and experts in information retrieval and appraisal.

Main Methods:

• Participants (novices and experts) performed a 10-minute information search task.
• Data collected via observational and retrospective think-aloud protocols.
• Multi-stream data (think-aloud, HCI, screen content) coded and analyzed using the R package {rock} for SEA scores.

Main Results:

• Stimulus-engagement alignment (SEA) scores meaningfully compared encountered information with user engagement.
• Analysis revealed user engagement with credibility cues and detection of cue absence.
• SEA scores indicated context-sensitive information appraisal, considering encountered information quality.

Conclusions:

• Stimulus-engagement alignment (SEA) provides epistemic access to user-content interactions.
• SEA enables trend identification across participants by using a consistent coding scheme.
• This approach offers a comprehensive analysis for understanding organic web-based search behavior.