“Some of the best ideas for this research came from all those who write and comment on E-patients.net, The Health Care Blog, and Twitter. We look forward to continuing the conversation!”

This study brought together so much of what we have been talking about here for the last 3 years (really, counting how forward-thinking Tom was, for the last decade).

And to give more credit, the partnership with the California HealthCare Foundation absolutely kicked my game up a notch by providing funding for Spanish-speaking interviewers, a cell phone component, and a California oversample. Stay tuned for more updates this summer on that oversample data!

Kevin’s remark about the much deeper involvement of the younger crowd is probably spot on. Alan’s remark about the constant increase of laptop use in colleges is definitely part of the explanation. For today’s college students the ubiquitous computer is just a reality, not something to be discussed.

But there is another underlying element that explains the deep transformation of college students into e-patients: the constant flow of news regarding the inability of a fast growing percentage of the US population in obtaining healthcare insurance. I have heard on NPR quite a few interviews of college students stating specifically that they expect not being able to get HC coverage, after they graduate. This directly relates to one of my earlier posts (Will The Great Recession Create Millions of e-Patients?). Maybe Susannah’s forthcoming analysis will shed some light of how prevalent that trend is.

My slightly informed guess is that it will turn out to be a generational change, one of those unexpected events who profoundly change a society.

It’s kind of like the joke about Microsoft stock in the 90s: we should have bought NOW, or NOW, or… NOW.

We dip our hands into the survey data stream and pull out what we can catch at that moment. I wondered if we’d waited too long and missed the toddler phase of social media & health, but apparently not. Now we’ve got benchmark data that everyone can use – our survey questions are already posted to our site for anyone to replicate in their own work.

Stay tuned to http://www.pewinternet.org for a special look at today’s college students – we’ve got data and are analyzing it now.

But before I say anything else, “BRAVO! Another tour de force.”

After your last comment above, you’ve got me wondering how to put together your data about the unity of 18-29 and 30-49 age subsets with Kevin’s observation that those in college now seem more plugged in than those in college even just a few years ago.

Perhaps it’s more the year than the age.

When I visited potential colleges to attend a few years ago with my now-22-year-old, a few students had laptops open during some lectures. When I did the college visit thing with my now-20-year old, about half of the students had laptops open during class. But when I visited colleges with my 18-year-old daughter this year, almost every student in every class had laptops open and were online taking notes, checking email, instant messaging, bidding on eBay, reading the news — and searching on whatever came to mind. Big change. Fast.

But it’s not just in lecture halls. It’s restaurants, parks, trains, coffee shops, and other venues where laptops weren’t as common two years ago. And desktop computers are starting to become a bit like landline telephones.

Also, I wonder if your data would have looked different one year ago? My “old” high school friends discovered Facebook about a year ago. Perhaps the “time to spread” from demographic to demographic is decreasing, so it’s harder to catch age stratifications under 49 unless the targeted questions come in the first months of a new platform or technology.

But these are minor musings. Your compelling data is the state-of-the-art map of our current landscape.

It was actually pretty surprising to see how the 40-somethings held their own in this survey. I expected to see bigger differences among the age group subsets (18-29, 30-49) but when it comes to engaging in social media related to health, they are more united than divided. It’s the older internet users who are still pretty tuned out when it comes to the social hive – present company excepted (ducking for cover from my Boomer colleagues).

When I saw that the “young people” are aged 18-49, I was definitely taken aback. Since the birth of the internet, my generation (says a proud 20-year-old) has been online for over half our life time, and it’s my opinion that the large demographic of 18-49 wouldn’t really capture everything you want out of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than 90% of people aged 18-35 are e-patients, while the 36-49 age group would be more like 60%. I have no hard facts on it, this is just a speculation, based on how often I have found advice for other ‘young people’ in the 35-49 range (my friends’ parents specifically) because they had not even thought to look at the internet as a credible source.