Journalism professor follows up breast cancer study
Journalism Prof. Kim Walsh-Childers’ hometown of Buffalo, Mo., had one doctor and stood an hour away from the closest hospital. So she had a personal connection to the $241,000 research grant she recently proposed to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Walsh-Childers plans to investigate rural breast cancer patients’ use of the Internet for health information. She expects to find out if the proposal is funded by March.
If the project receives no funding, Walsh-Childers will revise and resubmit the proposal or seek other funding sources.
Walsh-Childers recently completed an NCI-funded $143,000 study about the accuracy of the media’s breast cancer information. It shows that although Web sites provide generally accurate or at least partially accurate information, many of them fail to address all of the facts listed by an expert panel as the keys to understanding the disease. To find complete information, women must do extensive Web surfing and visit multiple pages within a site.
Potent partnership
Once she discovered that accurate information was available but often difficult to find, Walsh-Childers teamed up with Dr. Ellen Lopez of the College of Public Health and Health Professions, to research how and where rural breast cancer patients find medical information. After Lopez moved to Alaska with her family, Walsh-Childers resubmitted the proposal with Dr. Mary Ann Burg, an associate professor at the UF College of Medicine.
“When we were searching for information for the original grant, we realized we have no clue what strategy typical patients use,” Walsh-Childers said. “We knew they were looking, we just didn’t know how.”
Walsh-Childers proposed the $241,000 grant to help organizations make the information more available and user-friendly. She and Burg plan to help breast cancer patients and survivors better use the Internet by giving their information needs and preferences to Web content providers.
The research will incorporate focus groups of rural white and African-American women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer in the previous five years. Women of other ethnicities will be excluded because adding another racial group would increase costs over the projected budget. The research also will include think-aloud interviews, in which subjects search online for cancer-related information while a researcher records their activity and asks questions about their thought processes.
“It’s an interactive search and interview,” Walsh-Childers said. “I can ask which sites are more attractive or seem trustworthy. It’s a perfect way to gain insight into the minds of cancer patients looking for information on their disease.”
This article was originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of communigator.
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