TY - JOUR AU - Kimmerle, Joachim AU - Bientzle, Martina AU - Cress, Ulrike PY - 2014 DA - 2014/12/04 TI - Personal Experiences and Emotionality in Health-Related Knowledge Exchange in Internet Forums: A Randomized Controlled Field Experiment Comparing Responses to Facts Vs Personal Experiences JO - J Med Internet Res SP - e277 VL - 16 IS - 12 KW - personal experiences KW - emotionality KW - health KW - knowledge exchange KW - field experiment KW - Internet forums AB - Background: On the Internet, people share personal experiences as well as facts and objective information. This also holds true for the exchange of health-related information in a variety of Internet forums. In online discussions about health topics, both fact-oriented and strongly personal contributions occur on a regular basis. Objective: In this field experiment, we examined in what way the particular type of contribution (ie, factual information vs personal experiences) has an impact on the subsequent communication in health-related Internet forums. Methods: For this purpose, we posted parallelized queries to 28 comparable Internet forums; queries were identical with regard to the information contained but included either fact-oriented descriptions or personal experiences related to measles vaccination. In the factual information condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the neutral summary of a scientific article. In the personal experiences condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the same information as in the first condition, but were framed as personal experiences Results: We found no evidence that personal experiences evoked more responses (mean 3.79, SD 3.91) from other members of the Internet forums than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.14, SD 2.93, t26=0.126, P=.219). But personal experiences elicited emotional replies (mean 3.17, SD 1.29) from other users to a greater extent than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.13, SD 1.29, t81=3.659, P<.001). Conclusions: We suggest that personal experiences elicited more emotional replies due to the process of emotional anchoring of people’s own style of communication. We recommend future studies should aim at testing the hypotheses with more general and with less emotionally charged topics, constructing different fact-oriented posts, and examining additional potential factors of influence such as personality factors or particular communication situations. SN - 1438-8871 UR - http://www.jmir.org/2014/12/e277/ UR - https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3766 UR - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25486677 DO - 10.2196/jmir.3766 ID - info:doi/10.2196/jmir.3766 ER -