214,716 research outputs found
The Information Practices of People Living with Depression: Constructing Credibility and Authority
Depressive episodes and chronic depression often provide the impetus for both online and offline everyday life information-seeking and sharing and the seeking of support. While allopathic medication, psychiatric, and other biomedical services are the standard treatments for depression, people often use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to supplement or supplant biomedical treatments. Depression is a nebulous disorder with varying causes, illness trajectories, and a wide variety of potentially effective treatments. Often, treating and managing depression forms a project for life (Wikgren, 2001) where the need for information is continuous.
In the present study, I have used a constructionist, discourse analytic approach as outlined by Potter (1996) and Wooffitt (1992) to analyze the messages posted to three online newsgroups devoted to depression, CAM, and the practices of biomedicine and to analyze the transcripts from 10 semi-structured interviews with participants who self-identified as currently having depression or who have suffered from depression in the past. I have sought to understand how people justify using, or not using, CAM to treat depression. Specifically, I have investigated how people with depression use information in discourse to justify healthcare decisions and to create credible and authoritative accounts; how people with depression conceptualize CAM therapies, mainstream medicine, and depression and how these conceptualizations are represented in the discursive constructions of individuals as competent information-seekers and users; and I have investigated the information practices (e.g., everyday life information-seeking, sharing, and use) of people living with depression.
My findings show that while expert, biomedical information sources and knowledge are most often drawn upon and referred to by newsgroup posters and interviewees to warrant claims, people used a variety of discursive strategies and regular speech patterns to create credible and authoritative accounts, to portray themselves as competent information-seekers and users, to support their claims for either using or foregoing a certain treatment, and to counter the authoritative knowledge of biomedicine.
In addition, my findings emphasize the importance of orienting information discussed in Savolainen’s (1995) everyday life information-seeking (ELIS) model. For many people with depression, information was used to maintain a sense of coherence (related to “mastery of life” within the ELIS model) and to create meaning in addition to solving practical problems. My findings suggest that an additional information-seeking principle to those outlined by Harris and Dewdney (1994) deserves further research attention: people seek information that is congruent with their worldview and values
P04. Settlement Information Needs and Services: A Pilot Study with Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in Canada
Background: This study was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the information seeking behaviour of Bangladeshi immigrant women in Canada.
Methods: In February 2015, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-two women residing in the Greater Toronto Area to investigate the everyday life information practices, settlement information needs, and barriers faced accessing and using various information.
Results: Participants needed various pre-arrival and post-arrival information including information about important documents to bring, mental preparedness, employment information, childcare, and health. There was evidence of a high dependency on informal information networks (e.g., family members, friends) to meet diverse information needs. The study highlights the importance of offering a program of need-based settlement information services to these newcomers of Canada. The study presents a preliminary model on the connection between everyday life information practices of immigrants and their social integration and settlement.
Discussion and Conclusion: Despite the broad spectrum of services and programs available to the research participants, their accounts of immigration and settlement are filled with gaps in knowledge – gaps that could be readily filled with the provision of timely, need-based information that is accessible at the point of need. The pilot study further suggests that the provision of everyday information to help women “get on with their lives” has profound consequences for quality of life in Canada.
Interdisciplinary Reflection: The burgeoning interdisciplinary research on migration, immigration and settlement would benefit from consideration of the contributions information studies makes to understanding how newcomers, immigrants, and refugees deal with information in their lives
Internet Information and Communication Behavior during a Political Moment: The Iraq War, March 2003
This article explores the Internet as a resource for political information and communication in March 2003, when American troops were first sent to Iraq, offering us a unique setting of political context, information use, and technology. Employing a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project. We examine the political information behavior of the Internet respondents through an exploratory factor analysis; analyze the effects of personal demographic attributes and political attitudes, traditional and new media use, and technology on online behavior through multiple regression analysis; and assess the online political information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War. The factor analysis suggests four factors: activism, support, information seeking, and communication. The regression analysis indicates that gender, political attitudes and beliefs, motivation, traditional media consumption, perceptions of bias in the media, and computer experience and use predict online political information behavior, although the effects of these variables differ for the four factors. The information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War differed significantly. We conclude with a brief discussion of the value of "interdisciplinary poaching" for advancing the study of Internet information practices
The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence
Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped.
The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged
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Habitual Disclosure: Routine, Affordance and the Ethics of Young Peoples Social Media Data Surveillance
Drawing on findings from qualitative interviews and photo elicitation, this paper explores young people’s experiences of breaches of trust with social media platforms and how comfort is re-established despite continual violations. It provides rich qualitative accounts of users habitual relations with social media platforms. In particular, we seek to trace the process by which online affordances create conditions in which ‘sharing’ is regarded as not only routine and benign but pleasurable. Rather it is the withholding of data that is abnormalised. This process has significant implications for the ethics of data collection by problematising a focus on ‘consent’ to data collection by social media platforms. Active engagement with social media, we argue, is premised on a tentative, temporary, shaky trust that is repeatedly ruptured and repaired. We seek to understand the process by which violations of privacy and trust in social media platforms are remediated by their users and rendered ordinary again through everyday habits. We argue that the processes by which users become comfortable with social media platforms, through these routines, calls for an urgent reimagining of data privacy beyond the limited terms of consent
Challenges to Teaching Credibility Assessment in Contemporary Schooling
Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and CredibilityThis chapter explores several challenges that exist to teaching credibility assessment in the school environment. Challenges range from institutional barriers such as government regulation and school policies and procedures to dynamic challenges related to young people's cognitive development and the consequent difficulties of navigating a complex web environment. The chapter includes a critique of current practices for teaching kids credibility assessment and highlights some best practices for credibility education
Information behaviour in pre-literate societies.
This chapter arose from an exchange of ideas between a former life scientist, a former archaeologist, and a member of the Kope tribe, a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. All three now work in fields related to information sciences.
It discusses how notions of information have been dominated by text-based information sources, and considers how one group of people (the Kope) managed information in the absence of any awareness of text.
The study explores how the Kopi relate to information, how they use it, and where they get it from. It summarises the findings as six information roles. These are related to contemporary situations
Contours in reflexivity: Commitment, criteria and change
This article examines the intellectual contours in calls to reflexivity in social research. In charting changes in these calls and their ideas on the role of social research in society, the article draws out lessons for future orientation. Whilst highlighting that the contribution of social research to our common understanding is part of its vitality, different authors have sought to see it in terms of how social actions are produced in research texts, via the role of experience as a starting point for reflexivity, to deploying exclusion of the researcher from dominant forces in order to produce more accurate explanations of social relations. Overall, we can be left bewildered in the face of these differences. Yet the article concludes by arguing that each has its place for clarifying the role and place of social research in society, but that they should not be over-extended as that produces an inward-looking perspective and leads to a paralysis in practice
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Information encountering re-encountered: A conceptual re-examination of serendipity in the context of information acquisition
Purpose
In order to understand the totality, diversity and richness of human information behavior, increasing research attention has been paid to examining serendipity in the context of information acquisition. However, several issues have arisen as this research subfield has tried to find its feet; we have used different, inconsistent terminology to define this phenomenon (e.g. information encountering, accidental information discovery, incidental information acquisition), the scope of the phenomenon has not been clearly defined and its nature was not fully understood or fleshed-out.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, information encountering (IE) was proposed as the preferred term for serendipity in the context of information acquisition.
Findings
A reconceptualized definition and scope of IE was presented, a temporal model of IE and a refined model of IE that integrates the IE process with contextual factors and extends previous models of IE to include additional information acquisition activities pre- and postencounter.
Originality/value
By providing a more precise definition, clearer scope and richer theoretical description of the nature of IE, there was hope to make the phenomenon of serendipity in the context of information acquisition more accessible, encouraging future research consistency and thereby promoting deeper, more unified theoretical development
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