QUALITY OF HEALTH INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET IN THE OPINION OF INTERNET USERS

Being a global, universal communication network, the Internet has become an important distribution channel for information. The scope of information provided in the Internet is essentially unlimited and it concerns all aspects of human activity. In recent years, a significant increase in consumer health information in the Internet has been observed. More and more the Internet is being used as a source of information on health issues. Current statistical data and numerous empirical studies indicate that the primary manifestation of internet use in health matters is information retrieval. Finding information is currently not a problem. However, finding good quality information is still problematic. The key skills of Internet users are the ability to properly assess information and to extract from it the best, most reliable and useful content. The aim of the study was to investigate among Internet users their awareness of different quality of information contained in the network. The study was conducted in the spring of 2017 on a group of 173 students of the Computer Science course at the Lublin University of Technology. The research tool was a questionnaire containing 20 closed-type questions. The factors that determined whether the respondents considered the information to be reliable were specified. Some of those factors were: - confidence in the source of the information, - regarding the information as current, - logical linking of the information to other facts, - finding the same information in several independent sources, - retrieving the information from government websites, public institutions, or on social trust, - competence of the author of the information The results show that the first four factors were most important for respondents. Confidence in the source of the information was important for 72% of the respondents, current relevance of the information for 64%, logical linking of the information to other facts for 62% and finding the same information in several independent sources for 64%. The other two factors were less important, i.e. retrieving the information from government websites, public institutions, or on social trust was important for 33% and competence of the author of the information for 38% of respondents. The question whether the patient is able to find good information was answered.