Canadian research

[netwoman]

Kristen Berg - who is also part of the Netlab research team - is looking at health seeking behaviours for her PhD research. She talked about it a little at last year's CITASA. Here's a link to the document (but it covers all of our research, so go to page 34 of the document and that's where her stuff starts).

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/ConnectedLives/purcell-CL-12a.pdf

Here's a snipit:

Large networks, high levels of emailing, and high interest in health issues are all associated with high levels of online communication about health. More specifically, the more very close and somewhat close friends that people have, the more they communicate with doctors and health care professionals. Correlation analysis suggests that the more email people send per week from their home and work, the more they communicate online with friends or family members about health issues. [r = .243, p< 0.001] Behaviour and attitudes are similar: a positive attitude towards the internet is related to more online communication with family and friends about health. [r = .320, p< 0.001] Furthermore, the more respondents find that the internet makes tasks easier, the more likely they are to communicate about health issues with health care professionals.
In sum, there are general associations between having larger networks, communicating online with friends and family, and communicating online about health. Our findings are consistent with what social scientists have called “the buffering model” (House, 1985): There is a relationship between the number of network ties, the total number of emails, and communicating health concerns online as well as offline. Moreover, the positive attitudes towards the internet operate in conjunction with network size and internet use to foster high levels of seeking information online and discussing health. That our data do not show male-female differences in communicating and seeking information about health online suggests that ICTs may be lessening the longstanding likelihood of women to specialize in this area.