Information work in the chronic illness experience

A proliferation of health information on the Internet and increased pressures for individuals to manage their own healthcare (Eng et al., 1998; D. Lewis, Chang, & Friedman, 2005) have raised health information behavior—individuals’ needs, seeking and use of information related to health—as an area of concern for practitioners and researchers. The experience of chronic illness presents a unique and vivid case of health information behavior in that it involves conditions that: can be difficult to diagnose; are often treated through a combination of traditional medical and alternative therapies; and, engage the patient in active management and care over an extended period. The National Institutes of Health has identified both chronic illness management and the ability to “obtain, process, and understand basic health information” as imperative to improving national health outcomes (Young, 2004), highlighting the necessity of understanding information behavior as it relates to ongoing health conditions, and in developing scholarship that can account for a range of health information behavior more theoretically (Baker & Pettigrew, 1999).