Examining effective use of an Interactive Health Communication System (IHCS)

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate how breast cancer patients achieved quality-of-life benefits from the Internet-based Interactive Health Communication System (IHCS) by developing concepts and measures capturing important aspects of patients' use behaviors. Most information seeking research is cross-sectional by nature, thus limiting the boundaries of understanding the benefits of information acquisition behaviors as an individual style of long-term behavior. This static model precludes the study of a discrete behavior that occurs at a specific and meaningful point in time. This theoretical perspective is especially relevant for understanding cancer patients who typically go through meaningful psychological/physical events, treatments, or crises in the history of cancer. However, little is known whether and how patients individually apply information acquisition behaviors in various portions and in changing ways that correspond to their shifting information and support needs posed by their individual disease and treatment progression.;To that end, this research conceptualizes two modes of online information acquisition based on previous literature on cancer-related information seeking and human-computer interaction studies: (a) media behavior in search of a particular kind of content and information with specific goals and purposes (searching), and (b) media behavior to broadly explore lists and contents from the information environment (browsing). By analyzing within-individual changes in two modes through growth curve/longitudinal trajectory analysis, this dissertation reports on how individual history of the searching and browsing behaviors change over time, what demographic and clinical factors predict the temporal and stable aspects of information acquisition, and how changes in searching and browsing predict their quality of life benefits during cancer experience.;The results suggested considerable heterogeneity of searching and browsing behaviors across individuals. The finding confirmed the need to test theories of online information seeking that integrates its temporal characteristic by examining within-person variations over time. Furthermore, what the results strongly say about effective IHCS usage in accounting for various benefits is that it depends on how a patient uses the system. That is, improvements in patient status were linked to her commitment to use information services over weeks of time, either through consistency or increase in searching and browsing behaviors.