Susannah already provides an excellent overview of our major findings, so I won’t rehash those. I do want to note that we borrowed, from one of Susannah’s previous Pew surveys, a couple of questions about impact of information seeking, and the results were interesting. As our Tracking Report notes: “Consumers who actively researched health concerns widely reported positive impacts: More than half said the information changed their overall approach to maintaining their health, and four in five said that the information helped them to better understand how to treat an illness or condition.” African American and Hispanic information seekers were more likely than whites to report these positive effects, and one possible explanation we discuss in the report is that minority consumers are less likely to have a usual doctor or other care provider (which holds true even after controlling for other differences such as insurance status), so information they seek from other sources may have a more powerful impact than it would have if they had also heard the information from their usual providers. (Thanks again to Susannah for brainstorming about this issue!)

Genna and I did a lot more interesting data analysis than we were able to present in our report, so if anyone is interested in seeing more detailed data from our study, feel free to contact me: htu AT hschange DOT org. I’ve already provided more detailed data tables to the folks at the National Center for Health Marketing (part of the CDC) and other researchers.