The purpose of this study is to evaluate the websites run by public agencies that provide services to female marriage immigrants in Korea. The evaluation involved checking the websites' established condition and structural characteristics and for qual...
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the websites run by public agencies that provide services to female marriage immigrants in Korea. The evaluation involved checking the websites' established condition and structural characteristics and for quality of health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing, infant care if any provided.
The website selection for this study was conducted in three steps. The first step involved keyword search in three portal sites, Naver, Daum, and Nate, in addition to the website run by Ministry of Health and Welfare for female marriage immigrants' health promotion. The second step involved firstly eliminating the websites built by private individual and with business purposes and next selecting the websites that met the criteria for this study, which were sixty-three websites in total. Lastly, of these sixty-three websites, seven websites that provide female marriage immigrants with health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing, infant care were selected for quality evaluation as study subjects.
The established condition and structural characteristics of the websites were analyzed with the tools reformulated after reviewing the previously conducted studies by Sohn(2000), Chung and Park(2000), Cho(2010). The quality of health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing, infant care was consulted and evaluated by the total of eight experts consisting of five university professors from health medical field and three from IT/educational technology. Tools were utilized and were partially modified after reviewing DISCERN(Charnock et al., 1999) translated in Korean by Park et al.,(2005).
The collected data was analyzed on SPSS WIN 18.0 program.
The findings of this study are listed below.
1) According to the analysis of the established condition of the websites run by public agencies providing resources for female marriage immigrants, government agencies and non-profit organization/group respectively made up 57.1% and 42.9% of service providers , and the greatest number of service provider location was found in Gyeonggi Province (28.6%), which had eighteen, and next in Seoul (22.2%), which had fourteen.
2) According to the analysis of the structural characteristics of the websites run by national public agencies providing resources for female marriage immigrants, 92.5% of these websites had available means for user feedback, 22.2% of which would practically take such feedback into consideration. External links from other websites were included by 81.0% of the websites; membership function for confidentiality was utilized by 87.3%. The site map was included in 54% of the websites, and information content was provided in multiple different languages, the largest of which consisted of Chinese and Vietnamese (15.9%), besides Korean by 15.9% of the websites. In addition to this, these websites provided options for keyword search (14.3%) and FAQ(Frequently asked questions) related to homepage usage and information content.
3) The services provided by websites consisted of site-introduction (96.8%), announcement (95.2%), educational program guidelines (85.7%), and guidelines for living in Korea (7.5%). Among the provided guidelines for living in Korea, welfare, pregnancy/childbearing/infant care, and child education made up 15.9%, 11.1%, and 12.7% respectively.
4) The reliability of the health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing, and infant care provided by these websites for female marriage immigrants scored 2.24±0.86, the information quality scored 2.05±0.68, and the final quality evaluation scored 2.38±0.92, which was low, and all of seven websites even when taken individually scored below the half of possible score points.
This findings show that there are only a few websites run by national public agencies currently available for female marriage immigrants and are even fewer in frequency in websites that provide these female with health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing and infant care. What is more, the evaluation score of the quality of provided health information was unsatisfactory, which exposes potentially critical fault.
Therefore, it is an urgent responsibility of national public agencies to increase the number of related websites that provide health information regarding pregnancy, childbearing, infant care for female marriage immigrants. It is further crucial to reinforce the health information content and to verify or standardize the accuracy and appropriateness of these contents.
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