Perceived Credibility Of Online Health Information In China

With the rapid growth of online health information, Internet users become to be more concerned about the credibility of online health information. The objectives of the current study include finding out factors that may affect users' perceptions of the credibility of online health information and whether different users would choose different ways and use different standards to evaluate the credibility of online health information. By incorporating the three models of credibility evaluation (binary, threshold and spectral evaluation) suggested by Fogg and Tseng with the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) developed by Petty and Cacioppo, the researcher conducted a survey of college students in Ganzhou, a middle city in Jiangxi province, with a random sample of 388 respondents. The research found that the expertise and the surface authority of online health information and websites were meaningful in constructing users' perceived credibility. Users at different levels of professional knowledge would choose different ways and standards to evaluate the credibility of online health information. With more professional knowledge, users were more likely to choose central route and evaluate the credibility of online health information in terms of its quality. Factor analysis, a method relatively new to the research field of journalism and communication in China, was used in this study.