Plausibility of Using a Checklist With YouTube to Facilitate the Discovery of Acute Low Back Pain Self-Management Content: Exploratory Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Access to appropriate and effective care for acute low back pain (ALBP) is generally regarded as limited. Digital health interventions may improve access to appropriate ALBP care by facilitating decision making and self- management. Researchers have recognised the potential of YouTube as a clinical and patient education resource. However, the heterogeneity of evaluation approaches and variable quality of health information have generally limited the potential of YouTube as a self-management intervention. OBJECTIVE We investigated if it is plausible that a simple checklist may facilitate the discovery of appropriate guideline based ALBP self management content on YouTube. In order to establish plausibility we examined the following three subquestions: RQ1: What are the metadata characteristics of the videos in the date set? RQ2. What is the information quality of ALBP YouTube videos? RQ3 What are the characteristics of the YouTube data set based on an ALBP self-management checklist? METHODS This is an exploratory qualitative investigation. We identified 202 YouTube videos authored by chiropractors, physicians, physiotherapists, yoga and other disciplines. We identified videos in our data set through Youtube search, based on popular ALBP relevant search terms identified through Google Trends for YouTube. We accessed YouTube metadata using the YouTube Data Tools (YTDT) tool developed by the University of Amsterdam tool. We used a modified Brief Discern checklist to examine information quality. We developed a checklist based on Lancet Low Back Pain guidelines to examine self-management content. RESULTS We identified clear differences in the ALBP videos in our data set based on the author’s discipline. We found the videos authored by each discipline strongly featured a specific intervention domain eg education, treatment or exercise. We also found videos authored by physicians were consistently coded with the highest ALBP self-management content scores than all other disciplines. CONCLUSIONS We found that it is plausible that a checklist may assist in the discovery of appropriate ALBP self management content on YouTube. Further research is needed to establish the feasibility of cueing checklists for content discovery on YouTube for self-management of ALBP in specific clinical contexts.