AN EVALUATION OF THE QUALITY OF ONLINE HEALTH INFORMATION FOCUSING ON WEIGHT MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Introduction: The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the quality of the websites about weight loss management information available on the World Wide Web. Methods: The study was conducted by searching keywords which were ‘diet AND nutrition AND weight AND loss AND manage’ into the selected search engine which was Google. All the results were evaluated against exclusion and inclusion criteria and further evaluated for the quality and readability using the Flesch Reading Ease test of the websites. Results: A total of 262 websites were evaluated, where 72 met the inclusion criteria and were selected as the sample for the assessment of quality and readability. Overall, 73.6% of the studied websites had low quality, 38% and 52.8% had no author’s name or information, respectively, 100% were not updated within one month during the study period and only two websites had the Health on the Net logo. From the Flesch Reading Ease score, 43.1% of the websites were categorized as ‘standard’. The quality scores were not correlated with the readability scores (r = -0.007, p = 0.954). Compared with non-commercial websites, the mean value of commercial websites was higher (3.907 ± 1.507 and 6.267 ± 2.352 respectively). The quality of most websites selected in this study was not satisfactory. Conclusions: This study showed that mean score for quality of the commercial websites was higher than non-commercial website. This study illustrates the importance of monitoring online health information to ensure that the public have access to reliable health facts.

KEYWORDS:  Obesity, Diet, Health, Weight Management, Quality, Websites