Quality of Douyin videos on childhood asthma: A cross-sectional content analysis.

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the information quality of childhood asthma-related videos on the Douyin (China-market counterpart of international TikTok) short-video platform. On June 1, 2025 (Beijing time, logged-out, and non-personalized account context), we searched Douyin using the Chinese search term "," selecting the top 200 videos and ultimately including 175 videos for quality evaluation. Structured content integrity assessment tools and an instrument for judging the quality of written consumer health information on treatment choices (DISCERN) were used. The correlation between video quality and characteristics (duration, likes, comments, and shares) was analyzed. Two independent investigators performed title-and-content screening with predefined operational exclusion criteria. Inter-rater reliability was calculated before consensus adjudication. Most childhood asthma videos were created by self-identified health professionals. Content integrity scores were as follows: definition (0.325 ± 0.21), symptoms (0.521 ± 0.32), risk factors (0.294 ± 0.50), evaluation (0.425 ± 0.45), management (1.24 ± 0.47), and outcomes (0.864 ± 0.38). Among evaluated videos, 160 (91.4%) had a DISCERN score ≤50. Given that DISCERN was developed for written health information and has not been formally validated for short-form video, categorical labels ("fair," "poor," and "very poor") are interpreted descriptively only. No significant differences in DISCERN dimension scores were found across 3 sorting criteria. Duration-stratified analyses within the final n = 175 dataset showed that videos with 60 to 300 seconds exhibited higher DISCERN information-reliability and overall-quality scores compared with videos ≤60 seconds; the >300 seconds stratum contained only 4 videos, and only descriptive statistics are reported for this subgroup. Top-ranked subgroup analyses were subsets sampled from the primary 175-video dataset rather than independent samples. Our analysis reveals that the quality of the sampled set of childhood-asthma-related videos retrieved from Douyin is suboptimal and lacks comprehensive information; findings cannot be generalized to all childhood-asthma-related content hosted on this platform. These findings reflect content-level deficits rather than inherent hazards of the Douyin platform.