Online Health Information Seeking by Parents for Their Children: Systematic Review and Agenda for Further Research

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Background

Parents commonly use the internet to search for information about their child’s health-related symptoms and guide parental health-related decisions. Despite the impact of parental online health seeking on offline health behaviors, this area of research remains understudied. Previous literature has not adequately distinguished searched behaviors when searching for oneself or one`s child.

Objective

The purpose of this review is to examine prevalences and associated variables of parent-child online health information seeking; investigate parents’ health-related online behavior regarding how they find, use, and evaluate information; and identify barriers and concerns that they experience during the search. Based on this analysis, we develop a conceptual model of potentially important variables of proxy online health information seeking, with a focus on building an agenda for further research.

Methods

We conducted a comprehensive systematic literature review of the PsycINFO, JMIR, and PubMed electronic databases. Studies between January 1994 and June 2018 were considered. The conceptual model was developed using an inductive mixed methods approach based on the investigated variables in the study sample.

Results

A total of 33 studies met the inclusion criteria. Findings suggest that parents worldwide are heavy online users of health-related information for their children across highly diverse circumstances. A total of 6 studies found high parental health anxiety, with prevalences ranging from 14% to 52%. Although parents reported wishing for more guidance from their pediatrician on how to find reliable information, they rarely discussed retrieved information from the web. The conceptual model of proxy online health information seeking includes 49 variables.

Conclusions

This systematic review identifies important gaps regarding the influence of health-related information on parents’ health behavior and outcomes. Follow-up studies are required to offer parents guidance on how to use the web for health purposes in an effective way, as well as solutions to the multifaceted problems during or after online health information seeking for their child. The conceptual model with the number of studies in each model category listed highlights how previous studies have hardly considered relational variables between the parent and child. An agenda for future research is presented.

Related collections

Most cited references 55

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Addressing Health-Related Misinformation on Social Media

Wen-Ying Chou, April Oh, William Klein (2018)

0 comments Cited 260 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Parenthood, information and support on the internet. A literature review of research on parents and professionals online

Lars Plantin, Kristian Daneback (2009)

Background The aim of this article was to address questions on how parents use the internet to find information and support regarding children, health and family life. Another aim was to find out how professionals use the internet to provide support and information to parents. This was done by a literature review. Methods Articles were searched for in five databases with a search strategy called "building block" approach. Results The review showed that the majority of today's parents search for both information and social support on the internet. However, there are considerable differences due to gender, age and socio-economic differences. First time middle class mothers aged 30–35 are most active in looking up health and parent information on the internet. In the same time, several studies report diminishing class differences on parent web sites. An important reason to the increasing number of parents who turn to the internet for information and interaction has shown to be the weakened support many of today's parents experience from their own parents, relatives and friends. Professionals have recognized the parents' great interest for going online and offer both information and support on the net. Conclusion Many benefits are reported, for example the possibility to reach out to a wider audience and to increase access to organisations without an increase in costs. Other benefits include the possibility for parents to remain anonymous in their contacts with professionals and that parents' perceived need for information can be effectively met around the clock. Interventions for wider groups of parents, such as parent training on the net, are still very rare and more research is needed to evaluate different types of interventions on the net. However, most studies were empirical and lacked theoretical frameworks which leave questions on how we can more fully understand this phenomenon unanswered.

0 comments Cited 90 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Cyberchondria: Overlap with health anxiety and unique relations with impairment, quality of life, and service utilization

Brittany Mathes, Aaron Norr, Nicholas Allan … (2018)

0 comments Cited 46 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Contributors

Christian Kubb:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9514-1281

Health Psychology UnitInstitute of PsychologyUniversität KlagenfurtUniversitätsstraße 65-67Klagenfurt, 9020Austria43 463 2700 1631christian.kubb@aau.at

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Med Internet Res

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J. Med. Internet Res

Journal ID (publisher-id): JMIR

Title: Journal of Medical Internet Research

Publisher: JMIR Publications (Toronto, Canada )

ISSN (Print): 1439-4456

ISSN (Electronic): 1438-8871

Publication date Collection: August 2020

Publication date (Electronic): 25 August 2020

Volume: 22

Issue: 8

Electronic Location Identifier: e19985

Affiliations

[1 ] Health Psychology Unit Institute of Psychology Universität Klagenfurt Klagenfurt Austria

Author notes

Corresponding Author: Christian Kubb christian.kubb@ 123456aau.at

Author information

Christian Kubb https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9514-1281

Heather M Foran https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6659-5500

Article

Publisher ID: v22i8e19985

DOI: 10.2196/19985

PMC ID: 7479585

PubMed ID: 32840484

SO-VID: de492357-ce79-4b88-a8f1-50f56198fbd3

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

History

Date received : 8 May 2020

Date revision requested : 15 June 2020

Date revision received : 2 July 2020

Date accepted : 7 July 2020

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Cited by 40

See all cited by

Most referenced authors 1,031

See all reference authors

Submit your digital health research with an established publisher
- celebrating 25 years of open access