How style, information depth and textual characteristics influence the usefulness of general practitioners' reviews

Online reviews provide increasingly important sources of information for different types of consumer decisions. The gaining popularity of online reviews in the realm of health services implies the need for a better understanding of their role in informed patient decision-making processes. This paper reports a qualitative study that investigates which textual and content elements are related to the perceived usefulness of online reviews for doctors (general practitioners). We investigated 234 online reviews and applied decision tree analysis to find patterns. The findings indicate that readers of online reviews for general practitioners are concerned with the whole content of the review and do not solely look at the valence or rating of a review. Furthermore, it was found that reviews with a more narrative or experiential style were overall perceived as more useful than more fact based or very short reviews. © 2015 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.