My research is centered on consumer health informatics and health-related information behavior. It is contextualized in HIV/AIDS prevention for women. HIV/AIDS represents not only a fatal disease, but also a serious problem of health disparity and social exclusion. Women are increasingly disproportionately infected by HIV/AIDS, thus are at a disadvantaged health status in this epidemic. 

In the earlier years of my PhD research, I had been focused on the societal implications of the Internet for health consumers, particularly the relationship between social and digital exclusion. The broad research questions that I had addressed were: (1) how social exclusion could lead to the digital exclusion for health consumers and how the digital exclusion could, in turn, exacerbate the social exclusion for them; (2) what website designers and the government can do to promote social and digital democracy for health consumers. The specific research questions I had examined included how insensitive construction and design of health education information on the Internet could contribute to the digital divide in information gain or impact for health consumers.

Studies on the digital divide largely focus on inequalities in people’s physical access to computers and the Internet, ability to use them, and degree of engagement in them. Although these dimensions of the digital divide still remains to be resolved, inequalities in information gain or impact is a related aspect that should not be ignored. Specifically, even if people had equal access, ability, and engagement, they may not equally benefit from the Internet in the sense of the mental, behavioral, or physical changes that would ensue from information reception and absorption. It is because information online may not be constructed or designed in a way that speaks to their cultural heritage, social condition, or aesthetic tastes. As a result of their experience of the information online, they may not choose to be exposed to or accept it. They may feel disappointed or offended, and eventually ignore or reject it. In this process of digital choice and decision, they could be deprived of the benefits that the Internet could have brought to them, which could worsen the status of those who are already socially disadvantaged.

My advisor and I used critical discourse analysis to examine some U.S. based HIV/AIDS websites, and found that the prevention information was often designed with males and the majorities as the default users. Women, especially minority women, were either ignored or depicted as “the others”. We also found that such information was often loaded with the ideology of patriarchy. For example, males were associated with authority and control, whereas women were represented as transmitters to their partners and children, as caregivers of others rather than themselves, and as passive, threatened, or responsible for their own victimization.

To further understand the obstacles that could obstruct women from benefiting from HIV/AIDS prevention information online, my research conducted in the more recent years for the doctoral dissertation was no longer restricted to looking at the information online from a researcher’s perspective, but from the health consumers or information users’ perspective. In my doctoral dissertation, I conducted an empirical study with 40 female participants to examine their information seeking outcome and information evaluation on government health websites in the context of HIV/AIDS prevention. I used think aloud and structured individual interview to solicit the female participants’ comments on their information seeking process and the information they found. The research findings of this empirical study identified intervening variables that could influence information seeking outcome and information evaluation. The research findings also suggested that women may not benefit from the HIV/AIDS prevention information online because of the problems with information accessibility, format, and content. I discussed the theoretical implications of the research findings for research on information behavior. I also discussed the practical implications of the research findings for website designers as to how to improve their design to better promote HIV/AIDS prevention to women. Thus, this research is significant both theoretically and practically. On one hand, it could enrich the literature in information behavior, public health communication and education, and the digital divide. On the other hand, it could help website designers better reach and educate women, and let them benefit more from the HIV/AIDS prevention information online. As a result, the health inequality for women in the HIV/AIDS epidemic could be alleviated.

In the future, I would like to participate in collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects to further investigate consumer health informatics and health-related information behavior. Examples of the research topics that I’m interested in exploring include empirical measurement of health information gain, empirical measurement of the relationship between evaluation and use of health information, gender differences in health-related information behavior, as well as the implications of the emerging Web 2.0 applications for health-related information behavior and the digital divide.