Internet Searching Behaviors of Low Literacy Breast Cancer Survivors

Internet searching is a popular tool for patients to find health-related information. However, low literacy individuals are at a disadvantage with respect to their ability to evaluate online health information. When using common web search engines to find health information, behaviors such as misspelling, misappropriation of words and incomplete search queries can result in inadequate results and misleading information. The goal of this research is to understand the search strategies and common mistakes that low-literacy Latina breast cancer survivors exhibit when searching for information online in order to inform future information seeking interfaces. To explore search behaviors online we asked survivors of breast cancer to search specific information about their condition on the web using either written or voice search. We also invited their caregivers as they often provide support for them. We video-taped their activity and analyzed the strategies they used to find information using a coding scheme developed for this task. We found that participants spent considerably more time evaluating the results lists rather than reading the information on any individual result. We also found that participants frequently read aloud as a comprehension strategy. We also surveyed the caregivers who, seemed to know less about breast cancer than the actual survivors. This study should be considered preliminary as we only have analyzed the activities of five women, however, there is a strong indication that low-literacy patients may not be understanding all they read on the internet and, moreover, result sets seem to overwhelm them. Lastly, it is possible that their caregivers are not able to help guide them either

Too Neurotic, Not Too Friendly: Structured Personality Classification on Textual Data

Personality plays a fundamental role in human interaction. With the increasing amount of online user-generated content, automatic detection of a person's personality based on the text she produces is an important step to labeling and analyzing human behavior at a large scale. To date, most approaches to personality classification have modeled each personality trait in isolation (e.g., independent binary classification). In this paper, we instead model the dependencies between different personality traits using conditional random fields. Our study finds a correlation between Agreeableness and Emotional Stability traits that can improve Agreeableness classification. However, we also find that accuracy on other traits can degrade with this approach, due in part to the overall problem difficulty

Understanding Socially Constructed Concepts Using Blogs Data

In this paper we propose a methodology to understand complex concepts, and which captures aspects of the contextual —and collaboratively constructed — meaning of these concepts with considerably less effort than manual coding. We use the word "quality" as one such concept to exemplify our methodology. By using unsupervised topic models along with a small corpus of human labeled data we explore the different uses of the concept "quality" in a large number of blogs. Our methodology is validated, qualitatively, by comparing our results to previous research. Finally, we note limitations and future directions of this work

Are You Convinced? A Wizard of Oz Study to Test Emotional vs. Rational Persuasion Strategies in Dialogues

This research explores ideal methods of persuasion through computer-mediated dialogue. We attempt to identify which persuasive strategy is most successful. We designed a Wizard of Oz laboratory experiment, where participants interact with a human wizard via a custom-developed web-based chat interface. The wizard attempted to persuade participants to learn more about Tai Chi using the following persuasive strategies: Emotional Positive, Emotional Negative, Rational Positive, and Rational Negative. Based on the results of the pre- and post-chat questionnaire, participants’ interest in learning Tai Chi was significantly greater after completing the dialogue and 69% percent of the participants printed a flyer to receive more information. Furthermore, conversations using the Emotional Positive strategies resulted in more successful persuasion than rational ones. The results of our study suggest that Emotional Positive strategies may be the most effective. We also suggest successful strategies as a design guideline for autonomous dialogue systems for persuasion

Web-based information seeking behaviors of low-literacy hispanic survivors of breast cancer: Observational pilot study

Background: Internet searching is a useful tool for seeking health information and one that can benefit low-literacy populations. However, low-literacy Hispanic survivors of breast cancer do not normally search for health information on the web. For them, the process of searching can be frustrating, as frequent mistakes while typing can result in misleading search results lists. Searches using voice (dictation) are preferred by this population; however, even if an appropriate result list is displayed, low-literacy Hispanic women may be challenged in their ability to fully understand any individual article from that list because of the complexity of the writing. Objective: This observational study aims to explore and describe web-based search behaviors of Hispanic survivors of breast cancer by themselves and with their caregivers, as well as to describe the challenges they face when processing health information on the web. Methods: We recruited 7 Hispanic female survivors of breast cancer. They had the option to bring a caregiver. Of the 7 women, 3 (43%) did, totaling 10 women. We administered the Health LiTT health literacy test, a demographic survey, and a breast cancer knowledge assessment. Next, we trained the participants to search on the web with either a keyboard or via voice. Then, they had to find information about 3 guided queries and 1 free-form query related to breast cancer. Participants were allowed to search in English or in Spanish. We video and audio recorded the computer activity of all participants and analyzed it. Results: We found web articles to be written for a grade level of 11.33 in English and 7.15 in Spanish. We also found that most participants preferred searching using voice but struggled with this modality. Pausing while searching via voice resulted in incomplete search queries, as it confused the search engine. At other times, background noises were detected and included in the search. We also found that participants formulated overly general queries to broaden the results list hoping to find more specific information. In addition, several participants considered their queries satisfied based on information from the snippets on the result lists alone. Finally, participants who spent more time reviewing articles scored higher on the health literacy test. Conclusions: Despite the problems of searching using speech, we found a preference for this modality, which suggests a need to avoid potential errors that could appear in written queries. We also found the use of general questions to increase the chances of answers to more specific concerns. Understanding search behaviors and information evaluation strategies for low-literacy Hispanic women survivors of breast cancer is fundamental to designing useful search interfaces that yield relevant and reliable information on the web