Tayebeh Negahban Bonabi 1,a, *, Ali Ansari Jaberi 2,b
2. Materials & methods
3.5 Self-empowerment
The information seeking process drives the individual towards “self-empowerment” in “stress management”, “better compatibility with health problems’, and “control on the situation’ via
“modification of life style”, “performing preventive behaviors”, and performing “self-care” and
“improved therapeutic compliance”. This will enable the individual to enjoy “better interaction with health-care personnel”, receiving high quality care”, “reduced cases of presenting to health-care facilities”, and “participating in decision-making”. To clarify this point, participant #15 said in this regard: “When I received some information on hypertension, I learned to correct my diet. I don’t take much salt and sugar now. I feel I can interact with my disease which will be with me all my life”.
4. Discussion
In the present study, the health information seeking behaviors began in the context of exposure to fear, feeling of ambiguity, and assurance of information reliability. The results of some studies have also introduced the concept of “uncertainty in daily living” as the major challenge [16]. Another study stated that women get hesitant in performing their familial and social duties in future by entering the disease process, initiation of treatment, and awareness of disease threat. Then, they started to seek health information from health personnel to settle these ambiguities [17]. The women
participating in this study, acquired a strong inducement for seeking health information following the feelings of insecurity and hesitancy in maintaining their existence. They resorted to different information seeking strategies to pass rightly and safely through the health-threatening pathways.
The concept of security and assurance is introduced in Gage’s study, too. The parents of cancer-affected children also got in touch with the parents of children with similar diseases through linking to social networks to ensure of care quality. In this way, they received the opinions of others and got assured of safety of care [18]. According to our findings, the women faced some challenges like the influence of beliefs and values, feelings of shame and pudency, previous negative experiences, and health-care costs in seeking health information. They failed to respond to their felt requirements of information in the path to obtain reliable information due to inadequate information on the network, inadequacy of information and health literacy, and insufficient availability of information sources.
Also, they faced contradictory information from various sources. In these conditions, they figured out the necessity of information filtering and formed their concept of experimentalism and specialty-centeredness. In so doing, they made greater benefit from local specialties due to their common cultural backgrounds, easy interaction, and the same language of communication.
However, they encountered the deficient performance of caregivers due to structural problems present in the health-care system and perceived and experienced their ignorance towards their own right of information seeking. These findings are almost similar to those of other researchers especially in a context similar to Iran. For instance, Das showed in a study that the participating women faced some psychological problems and also problems in the structure of health system in their health information seeking behavior [19]. In another study by Wathen et al., availability of appropriate health-care, information literacy, health literacy, stress induced by receiving of internet information, and lack of correspondence between health system assumptions and women’s life realities in the context of seeking health information were experienced and described [20]. The concept of self-direction can be looked at from two viewpoints: on the one hand, turning to informal unscientific sources may bring up some concerns about the possibility of exchanging wrong health information among the clients; on the other hand, these sources can be used as key factors and powerful sources for spreading useful and correct health information. The findings of this study further suggested that health information seeking behavior can empower women to cope with their health problems and disabilities and encourage them to seek more health information. This is consistent with the current literature so that acquisition of health information resulted in reinforcement of patients’ role in the management of their health-care [21] and their empowerment to filter the received information [22]. Moreover, a significant correlation has been reported between health information exchange and higher self-confidence and also encouragement for seeking more health information [23].
Acknowledgment
This article was extracted from Ph.D. thesis and Kerman University of Medical Sciences supported financially this research (approval and ethical Code No 93.133).
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