Health information seeking on the Internet: The role of involvement in searching for and assessing online health information

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on how young people with differing levels of involvement seek and evaluate information about the human papillomavirus online. The results, which are drawn from an experiment and a self-administered survey, suggest that compared to people with a low level of involvement, people with a high level of involvement engage in more information search activity. The results also indicate that those with a high level of involvement in a given subject place a higher value on a website’s message features than on its structural features. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.