Older Adults, Health
Information, and the Internet
Bo Xie

University of Maryland, College Park | [e-mail]

[ 1] Wicks, D. A. "Older Adults and Their Information-seeking." Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, 22, no. 2 (2004): 1– 26.

July + August 2008

[ 2] Benbassat, J., D. Pilpel, and M. Tidhar. “Patients’ Preferences for Participation in Clinical Decision Making: A review of published surveys.” Behavioral Medicine 24 (1998):81–88.

Margaret (not her real name), a 64-year-old, says she is interested in finding out more information about Vitamin D. A recent blood test performed as part of her annual checkup showed that Margaret’s Vitamin D level was low. She has since been taking Vitamin D, following her doctor’s directions. Margaret understands that it is “not critical” that she find out more information about this condition, and from a medical point of view, she is right. After all, the diagnosis has already been made, the treatment has already been prescribed, and she is taking the medicine as prescribed. There is really no need for this patient to have more information.

Still, Margaret stresses that she is “simply interested in finding out” more information about this condition because she is “curious.” Like the majority of her age peers, Margaret has always relied on doctors as her primary source of health and medical information [ 1]. Since this situation is not critical, she does not want to make a special appointment with her doctor. She plans to wait until her next regular appointment to see if she might be able to get information from her doctor—although she realizes that her time with the doctor during an office visit is typically too short, and she tends not to have the time to ask every question that she would like to ask. Meanwhile, since Margaret has been a computer user for a few years and has been hearing about all of the wonderful information that is available on the Internet, she wonders, would it be possible to find some information about Vitamin D online?

Margaret had been wondering about this for the past several months but had not actually tried to search for the information on the Internet—until she volunteered to participate in my summer 2007 study of older adults’ health-information behavior. When I asked Margaret what factors would affect her decision about whether or not to use the Internet to find heath information, she responded immediately (and quite emotionally): “If I knew how to use it!” She then started laughing, awkwardly:

“That’s the factor! And the fact is, I don’t know how very well.”

I asked her if she would be willing to actually try out her search ideas on a computer and show me her process; she agreed, after some hesitation. She sat in front of a computer, opened Internet Explorer, and when Google came up, she typed in “Vitamin D and absorption.” This search returned 1,400,000 results. She looked at the screen and said, “Okay, I need to do something so that I don’t have this many hits. I don’t know very well what to do, so I’m going to think of something to do.” She paused, and then typed in “Vitamin D and calcium absorption.” This time she got 1,200,000 results. She started laughing awkwardly again while staring at her search results and struggling to try to figure out what to do: “I don’t know what to do now. I’ve got a million two hundred thousand hits, and I guess I just start reading? That’s where I am with it. It just seems like there must be a better way to do something. So at this point I read for a while and I pick one that sounds good... it’s just hit and miss now, and it doesn't strike me as the best way to do any of this, but I don't know what to do.”

Margaret’s story can illustrate several important points regarding older adults’ health-information behavior, and the role and potential of the Internet in helping older adults obtain necessary health information.

First, older adults typically have greater needs than younger adults for health services and information, yet those needs are often unmet through conventional channels such as physicians and nurses [ 1]. There is extensive evidence that patients, older or younger, Internet users or not, want to have detailed information about their conditions and treatments, even if they still prefer that doctors make decisions about their healthcare [ 2]. As Margaret has told us, she is interested in having information—that would be noncritical from a medical point of view—because she wants to have