How Physicians and Medical Knowledge is Assessed in a Health Forum

Abstract

Web 2.0 is often referred to as ‘social’ or participatory. A genre of Web 2.0 to which this certainly applies is forums. Every user can take part in communication exchange and publish his or her knowledge, experience and his or her very own opinions. This study focuses on the genre of forums. I qualitatively (and according to discourse- or content-analytical criteria) analyzed the special features of such lay communication in the context of a specific forum. In terms of content, I am referring to a forum from Germany that deals with health issues. The aim was to examine how medical professionals and medical knowledge are valued. Since it is difficult to access exact numbers of users in the context of such a forum, I selected a specific website that appears in the list of the most visited websites, and that already has a special probability of being accessed due to its URL (hence the name): www.gesundheit.de (according to the legal notice, this forum is operated by Alliance Healthcare Germany, based in Frankfurt am Main). The topics were selected from posts published between December 2018 and April 2019. The contributions were transferred unchanged, i.e. including the orthographic and grammatical errors found in the original