title: Personal experiences and emotionality in health-related knowledge exchange in Internet forums: a randomized controlled field experiment comparing responses to facts vs personal experiences.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  On the Internet, people share personal experiences as well as facts and objective information. This also holds true for the exchange of health-related information in a variety of Internet forums. In online discussions about health topics, both fact-oriented and strongly personal contributions occur on a regular basis.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  In this field experiment, we examined in what way the particular type of contribution (ie, factual information vs personal experiences) has an impact on the subsequent communication in health-related Internet forums.
  
  
  METHODS
  For this purpose, we posted parallelized queries to 28 comparable Internet forums; queries were identical with regard to the information contained but included either fact-oriented descriptions or personal experiences related to measles vaccination. In the factual information condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the neutral summary of a scientific article. In the personal experiences condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the same information as in the first condition, but were framed as personal experiences
  
  
  RESULTS
  We found no evidence that personal experiences evoked more responses (mean 3.79, SD 3.91) from other members of the Internet forums than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.14, SD 2.93, t26=0.126, P=.219). But personal experiences elicited emotional replies (mean 3.17, SD 1.29) from other users to a greater extent than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.13, SD 1.29, t81=3.659, P<.001).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We suggest that personal experiences elicited more emotional replies due to the process of emotional anchoring of people's own style of communication. We recommend future studies should aim at testing the hypotheses with more general and with less emotionally charged topics, constructing different fact-oriented posts, and examining additional potential factors of influence such as personality factors or particular communication situations.
authors.affiliation: Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC), Knowledge Construction Lab, Tübingen, Germany. j.kimmerle@iwm-kmrc.de.
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6345-9498
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kimmerle
authors.forename: Martina
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1312-4032
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bientzle
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8996-8303
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Cress
mesh_terms: D019260:Expressed Emotion; D058015:Health Communication; D066275:Health Information Exchange / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D057226:Information Seeking Behavior; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D063545:Personal Narratives as Topic; D012944:Social Support
keywords: Internet forums; emotionality; field experiment; health; knowledge exchange; personal experiences