https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459319831331 Health 1–17 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1363459319831331 journals.sagepub.com/home/hea Where to find accurate information on attention- deficit hyperactivity disorder? A study of scientific distortions among French websites, newspapers, and television programs Sébastien Ponnou Evreux Institute of Technology, Interdisciplinary Research Center for Education and Training (CIRNEF - EA 7454), University of Rouen Normandy, France Héloïse Haliday Picardie Jules Verne University, Amiens, France François Gonon Institute of Degenerative Disease, CNRS UMR5293, University of Bordeaux, France Abstract Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is the most frequent mental disorder among school-age children. This condition has given rise to a large mediatic coverage, which contributed to the shaping of the lay public’s perceptions. We therefore conducted two studies on the way attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder was portrayed in the TV programs and the lay-public press in France between 1995 and 2015, but the growing part played by the Internet required an additional study to analyze and compare the scientific material which is available to the French lay public depending on the source of information used. We studied the 50 first French websites dedicated to attention-deficit/ hyperactivity as indexed by Google ® search engine using a structured quantitative content analysis for the web. We illustrate our results with excerpts derived from the websites. The conceptions of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder available on the Internet are Corresponding author: Sébastien Ponnou, Evreux Institute of Technology, Interdisciplinary Research Center for Education and Training (CIRNEF - EA 7454), University of Rouen Normandie, 55 rue Saint-Germain, 27000 Evreux, France. Email: sebastien.ponnou-delaffon@univ-rouen.fr 831331HEA 0 0 10.1177/1363459319831331HealthPonnou et al. research-article 2019 Article