Table 1.
Summary of participants in the 3 studies that focused on blog intention investigations.
| Characteristics | Study 1 (n=99) | Study 2 (n=167) | Study 3 (n=45) | |
| Type of sample | University research panel | Amazon MTurk master respondent panel | Convenience and snowball sample of medical blog readers | |
| Average age (years), mean (range) | 24.5 (18-46) | 44.8 (21-76) | Not collected | |
| Location | Southwestern US research university | United States | United States | |
| Research tools | Qualtrics XM Survey Software | Qualtrics XM Survey Software | Qualtrics XM Survey Software | |
| Development of tools | Adaptation of existing scales and creation of blog posts | Adaptation of existing scales and creation of blog posts | Blog evaluation scales repeated from studies 1 & 2 and additional questions | |
| Prior relationship with researcher | Primarily no (4 of the 99 were enrolled in the researcher’s course) | No | Some—convenience snowball sample | |
| Blinded | No—identifying information collected in a separate file from participant response data, per institution IRBa guidelines | Yes | Yes | |
| Statistical analysis | ||||
|
|
Quantitative data | One-way ANOVAb (SPSS) | One-way ANOVA, stepwise regression (SPSS) | Simple means and % reported |
|
|
Qualitative data | Hand coding of open-ended responses | Hand coding of open-ended responses | No coding—qualitative responses reviewed and summarized |
| Female, n (%) | 53 (53.3) | 94 (56.4) | Not collected | |
| Education | Current undergraduate students | Not provided by panel | Not collected | |
| Recruitment | University research panel software: Sona Systems | Posted on Amazon MTurkc open studies to eligible panelists | Recruitment via social media and snowball sample | |
| Percentage of original sample that completed the study, % | 97.1d | 88.4e | 76.3f | |
aIRB: institutional review board.
bANOVA: analysis of variance.
cMTurk: Mechanical Turk.
dN=102.
eN=189.
fN=59.