‘Cyberchondria’? – Formulating a research question and locating literature   no comments

Posted at 2:03 pm in Psychology

The broad interest for my interdisciplinary review is the use of health websites, and their effect on the individual.

Coming from a Sociological background, my overarching interest in this particular area is on how relationships are altered between doctors and patients due to the use of online health ‘facilities’; however, I have chosen to follow a more psychological route with this piece of work – namely, the effect of health websites on the individual, and whether this leads to what has popularly been termed ‘cyberchondria’. Furthermore, I will be locating literature from health sciences that I hope will complement not only the psychological findings, but which may also tie in with the literature from sociology that I have already read.

In order to do this, I first located readings that specifically referred to health anxieties and the web, which gave a few relevant readings, and the next step will be to follow this up with looking for introductory readings for psychology.

The second subject from Health Sciences is still provisional, and currently I do not know if I am going to persist with this. Some of the literature I have read has a slant towards Media Studies and other communicative media which seem highly interesting.

So many decisions, and currently feeling overwhelmed!

Written by rn5g08 on October 25th, 2011

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