A Study of the Demographics of Web-Based Health-Related Social Media Users.

J Med Internet Res

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States.

Published: August 2015

Background: The rapid spread of Web-based social media in recent years has impacted how patients share health-related information. However, little work has studied the demographics of these users.

Objective: Our aim was to study the demographics of users who participate in health-related Web-based social outlets to identify possible links to health care disparities.

Methods: We analyze and compare three different types of health-related social outlets: (1) general Web-based social networks, Twitter and Google+, (2) drug review websites, and (3) health Web forums. We focus on the following demographic attributes: age, gender, ethnicity, location, and writing level. We build and evaluate domain-specific classifiers to infer missing data where possible. The estimated demographic statistics are compared against various baselines, such as Internet and social networks usage of the population.

Results: We found that (1) drug review websites and health Web forums are dominated by female users, (2) the participants of health-related social outlets are generally older with the exception of the 65+ years bracket, (3) blacks are underrepresented in health-related social networks, (4) users in areas with better access to health care participate more in Web-based health-related social outlets, and (5) the writing level of users in health-related social outlets is significantly lower than the reading level of the population.

Conclusions: We identified interesting and actionable disparities in the participation of various demographic groups to various types of health-related social outlets. These disparities are significantly distinct from the disparities in Internet usage or general social outlets participation.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4705027PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.4308DOI Listing

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