Online Health Information Seeking Behavior of Users with Health Anxiety: An Empirical Study based on Eye-movement Experiment (Preprint)
Authors: Wang Lin , Yang Yutong , Ma Ziqiao 
Published: October 2023

BACKGROUND

In the post COVID-19 epidemic era, public's health anxiety continues to be a social problem. Online information seeking behavior is one of the main causes of health anxiety. Presently, research on the online health information-seeking behavior of users with health anxiety primarily relies on traditional methods such as questionnaires or interviews, which have certain limitations in revealing behavioral characteristics. Eye tracking provides an objective and useful approach for the research community to study users information behavior, which could be helpful to fully understand health anxious users’ online health information seeking behavior and its unique features.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to investigate the characteristics of health information-seeking behavior of users with health anxiety through eye-movement experiments and the retrospective thinking aloud method. It seeks to explore their information browsing behavior and strategies on search result pages and content pages, as well as the query escalation behavior during information search and its influencing factors.

METHODS

This study divided the subjects into a health anxiety group and a normal group, and designed an eye-movement experiment on online health information seeking behavior. The eye-tracking experiment employed the Tobii Pro Spectrum eye-tracking device. It simulated online health information searching in a 4 (4 scenarios) × 4 (1 search engine results page + 3 content pages) × 2 (2 experimental groups). The four thematic scenarios are oral ulcers, nosebleeds, low-grade fever, and neck swelling. The participants were required to imagine experiencing discomfort and search for relevant health information online based on their daily habits. Each participant spent between 20 and 30 minutes on the experiment. After the experiment, retrospective thinking aloud interviews were conducted to explore the characteristics and patterns of online health information seeking behavior of health anxiety users.

RESULTS

The data analysis results show that compared with the normal group, the health anxiety group mainly adopts a complete browsing mode when browsing search engine results pages(SERPs), and has multiple regressions and multiple judgments before making click decisions; It takes less time to enter the areas of interest （AOI） for the first time, and the fixation duration is longer. When browsing serious disease information, the average pupil diameter significantly expands, demonstrating higher sensitivity and judged relevance towards this type of information. When browsing content pages, users in the health anxiety group pay more attention to doctor information, which affects their perception of information credibility; The number of people who adopt full reading and full scanning modes for webpage content is higher than that of the normal group. In terms of online information search behavior, users in the health anxiety group are more likely to have query escalation. Information sensitivity has a significant positive influence on query escalation, while tolerance of uncertainty has a significant negative one. Information sensitivity plays a negative moderating role between tolerance of uncertainty and query escalation.

CONCLUSIONS

Compared to the normal group, users in the health anxiety group exhibited distinct behavioral characteristics of SERPs browsing, attention allocation. They were more prone to query escalation. Relevant organizations and health platforms can use the results of this study to improve information services quality, thereby alleviating health anxiety and improving mental health levels.