Roma Harris

Barriers to information : how formal help systems fail battered women

Illustrations Information Transfer Failures or Why Its so Hard to Locate the Information You Need Theory and Research On Information-Seeking Information and Referral as a Social Service Function Wife Assault: An Information-Seeking Perspective A Community Analysis of Information Need and System Response Community Perspectives on Wife Assault: Results of the Household Survey Professional Perspectives on Wife Assault: Results of the Agency Survey Missed Connections: What To Do When Systems are Unresponsive to Citizen Needs Appendices Bibliography Index

“I Try to Take Care of It Myself.” How Rural Women Search for Health Information

Rural living poses special challenges (and opportunities) for the significant health information intermediary role that women enact. The authors describe interviews with 40 women living in a rural, medically underserved county in south-western Ontario, Canada, who discussed their information-seeking experiences and the strategies used to find information about a chronic health concern or an acute medical problem. The womens stories reveal that they define health very broadly and that their information seeking is influenced by contextual factors, such as rural living and gender roles, that interplay with their self-reliance, health literacy, and the availability and willingness of others in professional and non-professional roles to give support within relationships of care. The authors discuss themes emerging from the interviews in connection with the apparent mismatch between womens lived realities and the policy assumptions supporting the development of e-health strategies for providing health information to people living in rural and remote communities.

When Do First-Year College Students Drink Most During the Academic Year? An Internet-Based Study of Daily and Weekly Drinking

Abstract Objective: The authors investigated the alcohol consumption trajectories among first-year university students. Participants: A sample of 415 students attending a large university in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, was recruited. Methods: Students completed a baseline questionnaire and 26 weekly brief Internet surveys assessing alcohol consumption from September 2006 to April 2007. Results: Findings indicated that alcohol consumption varies considerably as a function of time of the academic year. Overall trends indicate that students drink more heavily at the beginning of each semester and less during exam periods. Daily patterns indicate that most drinking occurs on weekends. The highest drinking days in the first academic year included Halloween, New Years Eve, and St. Patricks Day. Conclusions: The present study provides evidence that periods of high and low alcohol consumption are contingent upon specific events and the time of the year.

Searching for help and information: Abused women speak out

One hundred and five women who were abused by their intimate partners described their experiences in searching for help and the outcome of their interactions with different services that comprise the formal help network in a city with an international reputation for its coordinated response to woman abuse. In the aftermath of violent incidents, the women most frequently sought protection, safe shelter, removal of their abusive partners, advice about managing their situations, a criminal charge against their partners, and medical treatment for their injuries. The women tended to use help-seeking pathways that led them first to the police or a hospital emergency department. In turn, these services often directed them toward community agencies with a specific mandate to assist abused women. The abuse-specific agencies then referred the women to a wide range of services in the community. Regardless of the type of assistance they were seeking, the women repeatedly mentioned the importance of the personal demeanor of service providers when they assessed the outcomes of their encounters with the formal help system. The findings are discussed with respect to designing community coordination mechanisms that overcome common barriers to seeking help and information.

Information technology and social relations: portrayals of gender roles in high tech product advertisements

Advertisements for technology products were sampled from professional journals in the fields of business, computing science/engineering, and library and information science. Content analyses revealed that men are portrayed in the ads more frequently than women, although the distribution of male and female figures in various poses is more egalitarian in ads found in traditional library journals. The depictions of male and female roles in relation to technology is largely stereotypic. Men are often portrayed as deep thinkers who are connected to the future, whereas women are often present in ads in order to convey the notion of simplicity of product use.

Situating gender: students' perceptions of information work

Young people entering their first year of university studies were asked to give their impressions of 12 high knowledge and information sector occupations. Their perceptions yield a complex set of expectations that are consistent, in large measure, with experts’ predictions of the information sectors occupational winners and losers. The majority of students aspire to be self‐employed or to work in the private, rather than the public sector. Of the occupations included in the study, the students perceived the occupation “librarian” most negatively in terms of skill, status, compensation and future opportunity, unlike, for example, the similar occupation, “Internet researcher”. The results are discussed in term of the complex interactions of gender, computing, and skill on the attractiveness of difference types of work.

A Relational Perspective on HIV/AIDS Information Behaviour in Rural Canada

Abstract To manage their health effectively, persons living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) and their caregivers require reliable, up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS and its treatment. Access to timely health information is often a challenge for residents of remote or sparsely populated communities. In this paper we present findings from a research project conducted in three rural regions of Canada in which we investigated how rural PHAs, along with their formal and informal caregivers, exchange HIV/AIDS-related information and support. In the analysis of results, we use a conceptual framework taken from the literature of organizational learning. In particular, we consider how ideas about person-to-person information exchange that have emerged from social network studies in business settings, as well as how Etienne Wengers ideas about communities of practice apply to the health information behaviour of rural PHAs and their caregivers. The patterns of experience reported by study respondents illustrate the power of access to timely support from trusted informants, as well as the deepening of knowledge at the community level when interpersonal connections are consciously formed and maintained.

The moralization of healthy living: Burke’s rhetoric of rebirth and older adults’ accounts of healthy eating

This article develops a rhetorical analysis of how older adults in Canada and the UK engage with civic-moral imperatives of healthy living. The analysis draws on Burke’s concepts of ‘symbolic hierarchies’ and the ‘rhetoric of rebirth’ to explore how participants discursively negotiate the moralizing framework of self-regulation and self-improvement central to healthy eating discourse, in particular. Working from the premise that healthy eating is a ‘principle of perfection’ that citizens are encouraged to strive to achieve, the article traces the vocabularies and logical distinctions of ‘guilt’, ‘purification’ and ‘redemption’ in participants’ accounts of what healthy eating means to them. This analysis reveals some of the complex, situated and often strategic ways in which they rearticulate and reconfigure the normative imperatives of healthy eating in ways suited to their lived experience and their priorities for health and well-being in older age.

The Go-Betweens: Health, Technology and Info(r)mediation

Welcome or not, most people in Western countries are unable to get through a day without receiving a dose of health information. It is available from, passed through or pushed at health help seekers by health care professionals, alternative health care practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, employers, co-workers, friends, family members, vendors of health products and through government-sponsored health promotion campaigns. It is delivered through a variety of media, including self-help books, magazines, leaflets, television and radio advertising and programming and, increasingly, the internet. If the volume of health information present in the public domain in previous decades could be described as a mountain, the current situation might better be described as an avalanche. Recipes or directives about practices for healthy living, as well as information about medical conditions and treatments, prescription drugs and alternative health products and therapies, are everywhere. Against this dense backdrop of advice is the increasingly prevalent notion in public health policy that people, whether as patients, care providers, citizens or, increasingly, consumers, have an obligation to keep themselves informed about health matters.

Gender and technology relations in librarianship

As technology continues to change the landscape of information work, library workers are particularly affected. The results of a study of the impact of technological change on library work are reported in this paper. The findings, based on interviews with employees in major public and academic library systems in the United States and Canada, reveal that library workers, particularly women, feel they have little control over decision making involving the introduction, integration, and use of new technologies. Some respondents also questioned whether, as a result of the intensity of technological change, administrators continue to perceive any value in the traditional specialized knowledge of librarians. Nevertheless, nearly half of those who took part in the study expressed optimism about the benefits of technological change for their own careers, while others are hopeful that there will be an ongoing need for people, as well as machines, to deliver library services. The results are discussed in the context of other studies of technological change and occupational segregation by gender.