Consumer trust in health information on the web Paul Huntington David Nicholas Barrie Gunter Chris Russell Richard Withey and Panayiota Polydoratou The authors Information about the authors can be found at the end of the article. Keywords Trust, Worldwide web, Personal health, Information services Abstract In the case of health information the quality and authenticity of the digital information have always been a matter of major concern for health and information professionals. This paper seeks to explore these concerns from the consumers’ perspective. It addresses issues around the consumers’ trust of health information. An online questionnaire was used to gather the data. Over a period of three weeks more than 1,300 people responded to the online questionnaire produced by The British Life and Internet Project: 81 per cent or 997 of the respondents were from the UK. A major finding was that half the respondents believed only some or even none of the health information found on the web and 45 per cent said that they had found misleading health information. This was found to be truer for respondents who surfed around. Thus respondents who used five or more sites to inform them were more likely to have found misleading information. Finally, data are presented to show that data collected from another independent study, conducted on behalf of the Department of Health, come to many of the same conclusions. Electronic access The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0001-253X.htm Introduction If the number of health web site quality rating systems that have been published (or floated) is anything to go by, health information professionals are deeply concerned about the quality and authority (or otherwise) of health information. Digital health information offered directly to the consumer is plainly of special concern, as novice users will search and consume information in a non-health environment, where professional help and guidance will not be forthcoming. The questions that this paper seeks to address are whether the general public acknowledge and share the same concerns of the health and information professionals and policy makers; what awareness do they show in regard to the allegedly suspect quality and reliability of health information on the web? It has first to be said that the digital environment is a complicated one in which to make trust and reliability judgements. It is a relatively new and fast-changing environment, with new sites appearing all the time. This situation is clearly one in which authority is “up for grabs”. It is also difficult to judge authority because there are so many parties associated with the production of a digital information service – doctors, commercial content providers, broadcasters and pharmaceutical companies, to name just the major ones. This is all mitigated to a certain extent by the fact that the health consumer has a rich source of sites to choose from and they can make cross- comparisons themselves to check the veracity, authenticity, etc. of the data. Aims/objectives This study sought to discover whether digital information consumers trusted the health information they found on the web, encountered misleading information when they searched for health information, cross-checked the source of the data, and what were the reasons that would stop them from using a health web site. We also sought through a statistical analysis to characterise those people who were most questioning about the reliability of health information on the web. To this end the views of internet users was sought, via an online questionnaire, conducted by The British Life and Internet Project[1], a project to which the authors belong. These data were further enhanced with the results of a user study of Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives Volume 56 · Number 6 · 2004 · pp. 373-382 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0001-253X DOI 10.1108/00012530410570417 Received 7 April 2004 Revised 20 May 2004 Accepted 10 June 2004 373