An Eimation Method Of The Consumer Familiarity With Chinese Health Terms

【Background】Health is the eternal persuit in humans. With the development of society and theimprovement of attention to health, the need of healthy information is increasingaccordingly. People need to enrich their knowledge of health, understand theknowledge of disease diagnosis and treatment, take part in medical activities, and makemedical decisions. However, they have met many problems and obstacles in the realhealth communication activities, including obstacles of information acquisition andunderstanding mainly because of "information gap" between health informationconsumers and the existing information system, and the consequent unsatisfiedinformation needs. Supported with information technology, Consumer HealthInformatic (CHI) is an emerging field to meet the demand of the general public healthinformation and study how to adapt the expression of health information to theconsumer’s understanding, and how to adapt health information transfer mode to theconsumer’s information acquisition capability. Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV) isused as recognized informatics tools to solve health communication disorders, and isone of the hot research topic in the field of CHI. The study of vocabulary familiarity isan important step to promote the development of intelligence and personalization ofCHV, involving many other aspects of research such as consumer’s cognition,consumer environment, familiarity evaluation and prediction, etc. In our country, theresearch of CHI has not been attached importance extensively yet. This study is basedon the discipline and background of CHI, in combination with research status in Chinaand the Chinese language environment and foreign CHI theories. Under the premise ofanalyzing the practical results, the study focuses on the evaluation methodology ofhealth information consumer centered around Chinese healthy vocabulary familiarity. 【Objective】Aiming for studying the estimation method of the familiarity for Chinese healthterms, the understanding difference between Chinese consumer words and medicalprofessional vocabulary and familiarity evaluation tool have been designed, and theinfluence factors of the familiarity for consumer health terms has been explored too.For overcoming the language barrier during the process of consumer healthcommunication, it would provide a way to estimate health vocabulary familiarity, andlay a research foundation for building the health vocabulary of Chinese consumer.【Methods】This study uses the literature research method, survey method, Logisticregressionanalysis method.【Process&Results】Firstly, evaluation method of the health terms familiarity is studied. Taking theconsumers’ words from their searching questions as the corpus, and taking the conceptpair of consumers’words generated and its medical terms matched (consumers’words-medical concept pairs) as evaluating objects, the evaluation tool and questionnaire ofhealth terms familiarity are designed and edited.Secondly, the study analyzes familiarity difference between the medical termsand consumers’words to verify the cognitive differences existing between them.There are two forms of questionnaires: field distribution and online surveys. Theinvestigation respindent are people who have no formal medical professional educationand training. Every informant has completed any one of the two versions randomly.532questionnaires have been recycled, and503is valid (effective rate:94.55%).Thecomputing method of familiarity is that for each term of each questionnaire, if thechoice is the correct option then familiarity of the term is1, if not,0. For the overallsamples, familiarity of the term=total familiarity score of the term/number ofquestionnaires containing the term. The results showed that the average familiarity forall the terms in A and B questionnaire is0.59,0.61, with no difference between them.It indicated the questionnaire design in overlaps of consumer words and medicalterms is reasonable. When analyzing the familiarity for consumer words and medicalterms, the overall familiarity average for consumer words is0.64, and that for medicalterms is0.57. By means of Wilcoxcon signed-rank test, it is statistically significant(Z=2.937, P=0.003), the results indicated that the consumer words familiarity is higher than medical terms familiarity, and suggested that there is cognitive differences andfamiliarity differences between medical terms and consumers’ words for consumers(P=0.003).Thirdly, on the basis of previous studies, in order to achieve the automatedestimation of familiarity, and screen and recommend Health vocabulary which is easyfor consumer to understand, factors influencing the familiarity for Chinese healthyvocabulary were analyzed, and a logistic regression was employed and the predictionmodel was established. Investigation for health consumers has been conductedthrough field questionnaire and online questionnaire, with recycled580questionnaires(545valid, effective rate:93.97%). Then the questionnaires weredivided into two groups, one group(503) was for factor analysis and prediction model,and the small sample groups (42) was mainly used for model validation.503validquestionnaires has been analyzed for familiarity influence factors, and the resultsshowed that word familiarity of users was influenced by three aspects including eightfactors, i.e. demographic factors (gender, age, cultural level and occupation), healthrelated factors (health, health care, health literacy) and vocabulary factors (lgfrequency). All the above influence factors except the cultural level were the influencefactors of medical professional word familiarity(not including word frequency). Bythe small sample reliability test, the reliability of the Logistic model was verified,showing that the logistic method used to predict familiarity of the method is feasible.【Conclusions】⑴Consumers’ familiarity estimation method of Chinese health terms achievepreliminary successBased on the analysis of the characteristics of the Chinese linguistics and thedefinition of familiarity, the study developed and designed the compiling principlesand methods of the familiarity estimation tools, and compiled the familiarityevaluation tools of Chinese health words, so as to explore the consumer researchmethodology of particular consumers and professional words familiarity evaluation.After compiling the familiarity evaluation tools and determining the familiarityinfluence factors, Logistic regression method was utilized to build the logisticregression model of familiarity and influencing factors, so as to verify the feasibilityof the method of predict Chinese vocabulary familiarity.⑵Screening the influence factors of Chinese health terms familiarity The study has tested the familiarity for professional words and consumer words,screened and analyzed the influence factors of consumer familiarity for Chinesehealth terms. Although in the factors, the most are consistent with the foreign researchresults, bringing the health information attention, health literacy into familiarityinfluence factors and identifying them enriched the influence factors of familiarity.⑶Confirming the cognitive difference between professional terms andconsumers’ wordsUsing familiarity estimation tools, the author evaluated the familiarity of Chinesehealth information consumers for the professional terms and consumers’ words. Theresults showed that there was cognitive difference between professional terms andconsumers’ words, confirming the difference between the understanding cognition ofhealth language among Chinese health information consumers.