Unveiling Health Literacy through Web Search Behavior: A Classification-Based Analysis of User Interactions

More and more people are relying on the Web to find health information. Challenges faced by individuals with low health literacy in the real world likely persist in the virtual realm. To assist these users, our first step is to identify them. This study aims to uncover disparities in the information-seeking behavior of users with varying levels of health literacy. We utilized data gathered from a prior user experiment. Our approach involves a classification scheme encompassing events during web search sessions, spanning the browser, search engine, and web pages. Employing this scheme, we logged interactions from video recordings in the user study and subjected the event logs to descriptive and inferential analyses. Our data analysis unveils distinctive patterns within the low health literacy group. They exhibit a higher frequency of query reformulations with entirely new terms, engage in more left clicks, utilize the browser's backward functionality more frequently, and invest more time in interactions, including increased scrolling on results pages. Conversely, the high health literacy group demonstrates a greater propensity to click on universal results, extract text from URLs more often, and make more clicks with the mouse middle button. These findings offer valuable insights for inferring users' health literacy in a non-intrusive manner. The automatic inference of health literacy can pave the way for personalized services, enhancing accessibility to information and education for individuals with low health literacy, among other benefits.