Table 3.

Content theme: Searching for a broad spectrum of health content.

Participant Ethnicity	Searching for health conditions or general health topics	Searching as a reaction to symptoms
African American	Everything. Literally. But strangely, I didn’t do diabetes. Cancer…Everyone—it seems like everyone’s dying from cancer, heart disease. I mean, it’s kind of like the same thing, and I always thought, food was our trigger, like one of our main triggers, and how we’re eating.	I usually will go on Google, and whatever I think the ailment would be, I’ll just type that in and see what comes up. I’ll go to various websites, but it’s hard when you’re looking up information online ’cause not a lot of the sites are trustworthy. You have to kind of find a way to filter out the good sites from the bad ones. Find out what information is actually useful and what could be discarded…Even if I’m sniffling and sneezing, I’m like, “Ugh, this might be a cold.” I’ll type in “common cold” or “swine flu.”
Caucasian	I would say maybe, maybe once a month. I mean it possibly could be more. Like if I‘m on, like MSN website, MSN.com, and you know they’re advertising something that has to do with health, I might click on it. Or, if I want to look into something…then it might be more.	Anytime I think I’m sick, since I don’t have health insurance, I try to find a website. It will tell me “Well, if you have this and this, it might be this.” I can kind of get a feel for if it’s the flu or something like that…Recently, my girlfriend has some mental health issues, so I’ve been looking up those kind of things on WebMD or different websites like that. That’s the only one I can think of off-hand now. They’ve just been really unhelpful.
Mexican American	Yes, I have searched for cholesterol because that is what always worries me a little bit more, right? For the same reason, because of family issues. I have a grandfather who had a heart attack, and an aunt who had a stroke. So then you focus on cholesterol.	So, there specifically is what most interests me. Since these two had breast cancer, that’s where I focus more to see what risks I have.