Online Health Communities: On the Collaborative Construction of Lay Knowledge

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Abstract

Despite the internet’s dramatic influence on how people navigate the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of illnesses, we still know relatively little about how people go about acquiring and appraising health information from the internet—which is of variable accuracy and quality. This dissertation prospectus focuses on one substantial yet little understood fixture in the universe of health information on the web: online health communities. These cyber-communities are playing an increasingly vital role in providing knowledge and support to people with serious and chronic conditions but remain a conspicuously under-researched area of the American health enterprise. Using a large pool of original qualitative data derived from virtual ethnography, archival analysis, and in-depth interviews, my dissertation will seek to explicate how lay people 1) adjudicate the quality of health information they encounter online, 2) dismantle physicians’ long-held authority over diagnosis, and 3) build medical knowledge about their illnesses communally in cyberspace.

Author

• Drew Michael Foster, University of Michigan