Consumer health information needs in China – a case study of depression based on a Social Q&A community

BACKGROUND: The social Q&A community quickly becomes a popular platform for consumers to find health information because of its convenience and interactivity. METHODS: Based on the 10,861 depression questions collected in the Zhihu, the largest Q&A platform in China, we divided the healthy information needs description into nine categories with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We also divided the healthy information needs type into Physiological, affective and cognitive needs based on the Wilson model. RESULTS: The results show that the largest categories are depression symptom and social activities while the less concerned health information is prevention and medical insurance. More attention is paid to cognitive needs. We also find there is no strong correlation between attention and needs type. CONCLUSIONS: The purpose of this paper is to refine the consumer health information needs types to better understand the consumer health information characteristic in China.