The role of the internet as a tool to get information about health (A study on the students İnönü University)

Abstract Nowadays, the Internet has been used as a communication tool for health. People can search for their health and health problems. They can also diagnose and find a cure for their health problems thanks to their findings on the Internet. However, they sometimes think that they have a fatal disease because their symptoms show resemblance to dying patients' symptoms. These online searches for health problems can affect people's psychologies and have a negative effect on the patient during the treatment process. Therefore, it is significant that people should use these online data very carefully and check if they are up to date and reliable. The aim of this study is to ascertain whether people use the Internet to search for their health or not. This study aims to reveal the reasons why people search for their health on the Internet; if they make a diagnosis of their illness after the research, if they take medications or find a herbal remedy for their illness, if they trust their doctors and to find the most used online tools while searching out the Internet. Besides, people that took the survey also answered some demographic questions. Survey method is used in this study by asking face to face questions to the students of Inonu University studying in different faculties. SPSS 18 is used to decode the data of the survey done under the title " The role of the Internet as a tool to have information about health". Reliability and validity analysis has been done to check if the survey results are reliable and valid. Normality test, t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), chi-square and correlation analysis have been conducted at the end of the study.