American FactFinder search part 3

For this post I am seeing if Guided Search will enable me to find the information I am hoping is in the database about smartphone/mobile device ownership. Guided Search is a neat step-by-step process that I would definitely recommend to a new user trying to figure out this database. Here is what it looks like:

However, on step 2, topics, I explored the various categories that I could learn about and discovered that American FactFinder does not have data on mobile phone ownership, at least as far as I can tell.

However, looking at the list of  people topics, I could see that it would have some other local information about my target user group that I could use to improve my website design. Specifically, we know that people of different ages and different education levels tend to use websites differently. We also know that if there is a significant non-English-speaking population in our area, we need to expand our (mostly English-language) site accordingly. Information about age, education, and language are things I probably could get from FactFinder. In fact, from looking at Community Facts early in my search, I already know that the median age is reported there.

This data is more basic and the Community Facts function is so easy to use that I returned to the latter to search for my new information. See the next post.

PubMed results

From my PubMed search I discovered the concept of "culturally-relevant" website design. The article "Development of a Culturally Relevant Consumer Health Information Website for Harlem, New York" by Smith et. al. was particularly useful because it described in detail a process for gathering information and feedback from your target community in order to build a website that works well for that community. More general web design sources all state that your website should 'reflect its users' or 'take into account the intended audience' but they offer little guidance for how a designer might make that happen. Smith et al.'s abstract states: "Specifically, this article details how we sought to identify gaps, concerns, and uses of online health information and health care seeking in this local, predominantly racial and ethnic minority population. We review how we identified and addressed the multitude of variables that play a role in determining the degree of success in finding and using online health information, and include discussions about the genesis of the website and our successes and challenges in the development and implementation stages."

Unfortunately, my institution does not have access to the full article, but I could probably get it through interlibrary loan.

I was happy with how this search went. I had low expectations because I came in with the preconceived notion  that PubMed did not have much useful information about my topic and that what it did have would be hard for me to find because it is a subject-specific database outside any of my own areas of expertise. However, because I had the sense to make use of the database's help files and documentation, the search turned out to be very easy. All the literature in the searching courses I have taken mention the importance of consulting a database's help files, but it is easy in practice to think that either you are an experienced searcher so you don't need them or that they will be poorly-designed and unhelpful (this is only sometimes the case). Doing this search helped me learn an important lesson about database searching that I had been taught previously but had not really internalized until now.

PubMed search

*Please note: We have a fixed list of databases that the blogs must cover, and I misunderstood the instructions and covered ScienceDirect rather than PubMed earlier in the semester, so PubMed is coming late here.

This search project is somewhat unusual because, rather than choose a relevant database based on my search topic, I have to figure out what relevant information I might be able to find in a given database that I have to use that would contribute to an understanding of my search topic, web design. Since I thought that this might be a little difficult, the first thing I did, before I started searching, was to think about what kinds of information I might find in PubMed that would tell me something useful about web design.

I explored the different resources on the landing page, including "Topic-Specific Queries" and the MeSH subject headings to get an idea. I saw that the topic-specific queries list included the subject: "Health Literacy." I then remembered that the health sciences are known in LIS for doing a lot of studies on information-seeking behavior as it relates to getting medical information and making health choices. A study on patient/consumer information-seeking behavior on websites would probably provide useful information to us, so now we have a goal.

Clicking on "Health Literacy" in the subject list lead me to a whole page devoted to helping a searcher find health literacy information in PubMed. It's available here and here is a partial screenshot:

Their suggested search is giant (you can see just the beginning of it above) but its basic structure is:
 [a bunch of terms related to health literacy connected by OR] AND English [language limiter]
I copied their suggested search strategy and did a search. However, as you can see from the partial screenshot below, we'll actually need to narrow it down further because web-related results do not feature prominently in the top results:


I'll show the revision in the next post.