Did online publishers “get it right”? Using a naturalistic search strategy to review cognitive health promotion content on internet webpages
Date
2017-06-15
Authors
Delbaere, Marjorie
Hunter, P.
O'Connel, M.
Cammer, A.
Seaton, J.
Friedrich, T.
Fick, F.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
BMC Geriatrics
ORCID
Type
Article
Degree Level
Abstract
Background
One of the most common uses of the Internet is to search for health-related information. Although scientific evidence pertaining to cognitive health promotion has expanded rapidly in recent years, it is unclear how much of this information has been made available to Internet users. Thus, the purpose of our study was to assess the reliability and quality of information about cognitive health promotion encountered by typical Internet users.
Methods
To generate a list of relevant search terms employed by Internet users, we entered seed search terms in Google Trends and recorded any terms consistently used in the prior 2 years. To further approximate the behaviour of typical Internet users, we entered each term in Google and sampled the first two relevant results. This search, completed in October 2014, resulted in a sample of 86 webpages, 48 of which had content related to cognitive health promotion. An interdisciplinary team rated the information reliability and quality of these webpages using a standardized measure.
Results
We found that information reliability and quality were moderate, on average. Just one retrieved page mentioned best practice, national recommendations, or consensus guidelines by name. Commercial content (i.e., product promotion, advertising content, or non-commercial) was associated with differences in reliability and quality, with product promoter webpages having the lowest mean reliability and quality ratings.
Conclusions
As efforts to communicate the association between lifestyle and cognitive health continue to expand, we offer these results as a baseline assessment of the reliability and quality of cognitive health promotion on the Internet.
Description
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords
naturalistic search strategy, cognitive health promotion, Internet, Webpages
Citation
Hunter, P. V., Delbaere, M., O'Connell, M. E., Cammer, A., Seaton, J. X., Friedrich, T., & Fick, F. (2017). Did online publishers "get it right"? Using a naturalistic search strategy to review cognitive health promotion content on internet webpages. BMC geriatrics, 17(1), 125. doi:10.1186/s12877-017-0515-3
Degree
Department
Program
Advisor
Committee
Citation
Hunter, P. V., Delbaere, M., O'Connell, M. E., Cammer, A., Seaton, J. X., Friedrich, T., & Fick, F. (2017). Did online publishers "get it right"? Using a naturalistic search strategy to review cognitive health promotion content on internet webpages. BMC geriatrics, 17(1), 125. doi:10.1186/s12877-017-0515-3
Part Of
item.page.relation.ispartofseries
DOI
10.1186/s12877-017-0515-3