Older Adults' Evaluation of the Credibility of Online Health Information

Evaluating the quality of online health information is one of the most significant challenges that older adults face in using the internet to inform their healthcare. In this exploratory study, we observed four older adults with distinctive backgrounds to evaluate a set of preselected webpages in response to hypothetical tasks and interviewed them based on the recording of their eye- and mouse-movements during their evaluation. Results revealed that older adults consistently relied on a set of limited number of webpage or language indicators to evaluate webpages. They had misconceptions concerning some quality indicators such as references and website types. The results suggest that future interventions to improve older adults' ability to evaluate online health information quality should consider their unique behavioral patterns and preconceptions of internet technologies.