What information on health does the Internet hide? A qualitative analysis of its content

Abstract

The rapprochement between the health care professional and the person requiring their help has been a subject that has been of interest to health psychology since its beginnings as a discipline. In the context of the information and knowledge society a new scenario of interaction between the two groups emerges that needs to be known. As a result, a number of different proposals have been started, but the one put forward by the Health Psychology and the Internet Research Group (PSINET) of the UOC is aimed at fostering the creation of virtual meeting spaces between the two groups (health care professionals and health matters users). The establishment of digital health care services platforms for citizens in the twenty-first century calls first for a knowledge of the reality of the different groups involved in the health and Internet relationship. The objective set out in this study focuses on the first group and on the discovery of what there is on the Internet relating to health. For this, and following an exhaustive Internet search methodology, websites on health in Catalan and Spanish have been collated and an analysis has been made of the textual data of the information contained on the Catalan websites. This analysis has enabled us to know and find out the prototype of health website that there is on the Internet at the time the study was conducted.