Parents’ User Experience Accessing and Using a Web-Based Map of COVID-19 Recommendations for Health Decision-Making: Qualitative Descriptive Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The eCOVID19 Recommendations Map & Gateway to Contextualization (RecMap) website was developed to identify all COVID-19 guidelines, assess the credibility and trustworthiness of the guidelines, and make recommendations understandable to various stakeholder groups. To date, little has been done to understand and explore parents' experiences when accessing and using the RecMap website for COVID-19 health decision-making. OBJECTIVE: To explore (1) where parents look for COVID-19 health information and why, (2) parents' user experience when accessing and using the RecMap website to make health decisions, and (3) what knowledge mobilization activities are needed to increase parents' awareness, use, and engagement with the RecMap website. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative descriptive study using semistructured interviews and a think-aloud activity with parents of children aged 18 years or younger living in Canada. Participants were asked to provide feedback on the RecMap website and to "think aloud" as they navigated the website to find relevant COVID-19 health recommendations. Demographic information was collected using a web-based questionnaire. A hybrid deductive and inductive thematic approach guided analysis and data synthesis. RESULTS: A total of 21 participants (13/21, 62% mothers) were interviewed and participated in a think-aloud activity. The data were categorized into four sections, representative of key elements that deductively and inductively emerged from the data: (1) parent information seeking behaviors and preferences for COVID-19, (2) RecMap website usability, (3) perceived usefulness of the RecMap website, and (4) knowledge mobilization strategies to increase awareness, use, and engagement of the RecMap website. Parents primarily used the internet to find COVID-19 information and focused on sources that they determined to be credible, trustworthy, simple, and engaging. As the pandemic evolved, participants' information-seeking behaviors changed, specifically their topics of interest and search frequency. Most parents were not aware of the RecMap website before this study but found satisfaction with its concept and layout and expressed intentions to use and share it with others. Parents experienced some barriers to using the RecMap website and suggested key areas for improvement to facilitate its usability and perceived usefulness. Recommendations included a more user-friendly home page for lay audiences (separate public-facing user interface), improving the search and filter options, quicker navigation, clearer titles, more family-friendly graphics, and improving mobile-friendly access. Several strategies to disseminate the RecMap website were also expressed, including a mix of traditional and nontraditional methods (handouts and social media) in credible and high-traffic locations that parents frequent often. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, parents liked the concept of the RecMap website but had some suggestions to improve its usability (language, navigation, and website interface). These findings can be used to improve the RecMap website for parents and offer insight for the development and dissemination of effective web-based health information tools and resources for the general public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".