Caregivers and web-based health information: An exploratory qualitative study of information seeking, information use, and perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: With Canada's aging population, increasing prevalence of chronic disease, and overburdened healthcare systems, there is a growing pressure on family caregivers to manage the care of their family members or friends.The demands of caregiving, however, can be challenging and may result in caregiver distress and an inability for caregivers to continue in their role.To help address this issue, interventions that are developed to support caregivers may contribute to greater confidence, capacity and satisfaction with their role, as well as better outcomes for their care recipient.The Internet is one area that now plays a significant role in information delivery and support services.Offering web-based support to caregivers may assist this population to provide quality care and remain in good health.In particular, online information based upon personal health and illness experiences (PHEx) could be particularly helpful for those populations, such as caregivers, that are isolated and lack support services.In order to provide optimal support and services to caregivers through web-based initiatives, a better understanding for how caregivers search for and use online health information is needed.Furthermore, it will be valuable to explore caregivers' perspectives towards online PHEx information, as this may be an especially appealing and valuable means of information delivery for this population.Methods: Three focus groups were conducted with a total of 16 people to explore how caregivers retrieve and use health information on the Internet, as well as their perspectives towards the structure, design, and content of an online PHEx website.Results: 1) In terms of how caregivers retrieve and use online health information, three broad themes were identified: searching for and choosing online health information; empowerment through use of online health information; and concerns with health information on the Internet.2) In terms of caregivers' perspectives towards the structure, design, and content of a PHEx website, two broad themes were identified: factors important for first impressions of a PHEx website; and perceived needs and expectations for the content presented on a PHEx website.Conclusions: Caregivers offered key insights regarding online health information retrieval, usage, and other perspectives, which will be helpful for future web-Preface: This thesis represents a culmination of work and learning experience that has taken place over a period of 20 months at McGill University and St. Mary's Hospital in Montreal
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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 | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".