Weighing the advice of doctors versus online strangers
A socio-demographic profile
Keywords:
trust in healthcare, online information seeking, reactanceAbstract
Medical misinformation is ubiquitous online. Parents are left to navigate conflicting advice between formal healthcare providers (HCPs) and people who post in online forums such as “mommy groups”. The purpose of this study was to develop a data-driven socio-demographic profile of people who weight the advice of online users either more than or equal to that of credentialed HCPs. We accomplished this, in part, by developing a new questionnaire representing people’s attitudes towards “all natural” products and services. Factor analyses revealed this construct is multi-faceted. We conducted an online survey of 957 parents (or people who planned on becoming parents in the near future). Contrary to popular stereotypes, affluent white women were not the ones who primarily distrusted HCPs. In some cases, the opposite was true. Distrust in HPCs (and problematic amounts of trust in online forum users) was not strongly associated with many demographic variables at all. Rather, these patterns of distrust were strongly related to complex attitudes towards what they perceive as “all natural” and with psychological reactance, a tendency to respond with oppositional behavior in response to perceived threats to their autonomy.
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