ScienceCampus Tuebingen, Cluster: Construction and Exchange of Complementary Medical Knowledge in Informational Environments
January 2011 - December 2012
ScienceCampus Tuebingen
Nowadays, internet forums, wikis, and blogs are used extensively for health-related knowledge construction. In a first step, this project has examined how knowledge exchange about complementary medical topics occurs in sports-related and in health-ideology online communities (netzathleten.de and urkostforum.de, respectively). It has been shown that the interpretation and use of health knowledge are strongly influenced by individual and collective concepts of health, and are thereby dependent on social issues. In addition, we’ve recognized that logical inconsistencies in collaborative health-related knowledge construction are widespread. Based on these findings, we investigate how people deal with health information that is contradictory to their individual knowledge and their individual health concept. An elaborate field experiment in cooperation with the PT Academy (a school of physiotherapy in Tuebingen), deals with these influences on health-related knowledge construction using wikis. Furthermore, field studies explore how online health communities handle new information representing their own or other health concept and how they deal with health-related statements peppered with logical inconsistencies.