Romanian and German Seniors in Quest of Online Health-Related Information: An Exploratory Comparative Study
Journal Title: Revista Română de Comunicare şi Relaţii Publice - Year 2018, Vol 20, Issue 1
Abstract
In the last years a shift in the practice of medical communication has occurred and it leads to a displacement from a paternalistic model of patient-provider information toward a model implying an embeddedness of the medical and human values in the medical interaction and in the decision-taking process of the informed patient. Researches show that older adults respond differently to online communication than younger adults. In this context, seniors face new challenges as regards health-related information and medical communication. The present study deals comparatively with the health-related internet use by the seniors in two European countries: Romania and Germany. Using a qualitative methodology, which involved the in-depth semi-structured interviewing of twenty persons aged 65 years or over who used the internet including for health-related search, we tried to find out which are the similarities and differences between the two samples as concerns health-related online informing and medical communication. Our research has revealed a number of interesting results and inferences. Thus, while between the two samples there are similarities as regards using the internet as a starting point for general information related to health and making informed medical decisions, there exist also a series of differences as regards various aspects, such as the health-related internet use itself – the interest and the ways of searching, the accessed content and websites, the trust in the reliability of the online information, the online feedback and activism etc., as well as the openness to discuss with the physicians about the information gained by the internet consumption.
Authors and Affiliations
Valentina Marinescu, Simona Rodat
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP292168
- DOI 10.21018/rjcpr.2018.1.251
- Views 127
- Downloads 0
Semiosis in Communication: Differences and Similarities
In a world of global communication, where everyone’s life depends increasingly on signs, language and communication, understanding how we relate to otherness, to differences in all their forms and aspects becomes more an...
Left/Right Polarity in Gestures and Politics The Multimodal Behavior of Political Actors in TV Debates
In this article we investigate how political actors involved in TV debates during the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections in Romania manage the relationship between handedness (left/right polarity in hand gestures) and...
Introductory Remarks
In one of the most widely used definitions of qualitative research, Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 3) describe this practice as consisting of “a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible”. However...
Media Construction of Sport Celebrities as National Heroes
Within the broader media-sport nexus framework, sport is known for providing not only engaging performances for the entertainment market, but also important symbolic capital in terms of national identity and public diplo...
The Marketing Values in News Production A Comparative Analytical Study
The main purpose of this study is to test the proposed marketing model in news production by applying it to the contentofanon-Western news organization as well as to explore the degree to which this proposed model predic...