Considering the local and the translocal. Reframing health information practice research using institutional ethnography
| Pages | 703-719 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2019-0046 |
| Date | 18 November 2019 |
| Published date | 18 November 2019 |
| Author | Nicole K. Dalmer |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Considering the local and
the translocal
Reframing health information practice research
using institutional ethnography
Nicole K. Dalmer
Department of Sociology, Trent University, Oshawa, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work
while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance that may be organising
that work. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the integration of institutional ethnography in health
information practice research represents an important shift in the way that Library and Information Science
professionals and researchers study and understand these practices.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper first explores the key tenets and conceptual underpinnings
of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, illuminating the importance of moving between translocal and
the local contexts and identifying ruling relations. Drawing from a library and information science study that
combined interviews and textual analyses to examine the social organisation of family caregivers’health-
related information work, the paper then explores the affordances of starting in the local particularities and
then moving outwards to the translocal.
Findings –The paper concludes with an overall assessment of what institutional ethnography can
contribute to investigations of health information practices. By pushing from the local to the translocal,
institutional ethnography enables a questioning of existing library and information science
conceptualisations of context and of reappraising the everyday-life information seeking work/non-work
dichotomy. Ultimately, in considering both the local and the translocal, institutional ethnography casts a
wider net on understanding individuals’health information practices.
Originality/value –With only two retrieved studies that combine institutional ethnography with the study
of health information practices, this paper offers health information practice researchers a new method of
inquiry in which to reframe the application of methods used.
Keywords Health information, Work, Information practices, Institutional ethnography,
Family caregiving, Ruling relations
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Originating in the 1970s by Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (2005),
institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that maps how the everyday world of
people’s experiences is “put together by relations that extend vastly beyond the everyday”
(p. 1). While rooting itself in the actualities of people’s everyday experiences, this method
of inquiry simultaneously acknowledges that these experiences are permeated and
coordinated by linkages and institutions (via what Smith calls ruling relations) that are
outside of and may be invisible to those living in their local, everyday environments.
Mapping and making known these relations that extend beyond the local and the
everyday is the crux of institutional ethnography.
While Stooke (2010) and Dalmer et al. (2017) have begun important conversations
prompting library and information science to take up institutional ethnography, this
method of inquiry remains not “widelytakenupbylibraryandinformationscience
researchers”(Stooke and McKenzie, 2009, p. 660). Institutional ethnography studies within
library and information science have predominantly focussed, to this point, on the many
lines of work in a library setting (McKenzie and Stooke, 2007; Stooke and McKenzie, 2009;
Johnston and Green, 2014; Green and Johnston, 2015). The mobilisation of institutional
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 71 No. 6, 2019
pp. 703-719
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-02-2019-0046
Received 16 February 2019
Revised 27 May 2019
30 July 2019
7 August 2019
10 August 2019
Accepted 19 August 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
703
Considering
the local and
the translocal
ethnography to trace the coordination of individuals’health information practices
includes but two studies to date: McKenzie’s (2006) study of the information practices in
midwifery care and Dalmer’s (2018a) study of the social organisation of family caregivers’
information-related care work.
Engaging with healthcare systems while navigating one’s (or one’s family) health is a
complex process that includes dealing with a number of forms, vast amounts of online
and print information, and a number of different healthcare professionals. As healthcare
systems contend with changes from tending to acute illnesses to chronic and comorbid
illnesses, health information practices are changing in response to longer and often
uncertain trajectories of illnesses that involve composites of healthcare practitioners and
health organisations and systems that change over time. Trends in the production
and consumption of health information from an increasing number of sources arise
from changing policies that reflect an “increasing emphasis on the role of individual
citizens in maintaining and managing their own health”(Harris, 2009, p. 72). This
expectation that individuals will play an increasingly active role in gathering, managing
andmakingsenseofinformationtocarefortheirhealthandthehealthoftheirfamilyis
contrasted by a significant number of studies that continue to report that individuals’
health information needs are often unmet ( Johnson and Case, 2012); indicative that a
different, multi-level approach to study and respond to individuals’health information
practices is needed.
Health information practices have been predominantly studied under the umbrella of two
dimensions: the information dimension (type and amount) and the method dimension
(sources and strategies used) (Lambert and Loiselle, 2007). This focus on concrete and
countable units or categories is upheld by “current study measures and methods [that] are
limited and do not consider the social milieu where individuals actively search for health
information”(Anker et al., 2011, p. 353). As such, to fully understand individuals’health
information practices, we must move beyond individual-focussed information behaviour
research that continues to ask “who or what do people consult for information?”(Case, 2002,
p. 256) and begin to (also) identify the institutional structures that shape, foster or inhibit
health information practices. Accordingly, throughout this paper, I refer to individuals’
health information activities as practices in recognition that these activities are socially
structured and mediated practices (McKenzie, 2003).
Johnson and Case (2012) assert that health information seeking remains poorly
understood, prompting future health information research efforts to ask how “individual
agency [is] limited and shaped by the larger information fields and carriers that compose an
individual’s information environment”(p. 212). In response, this paper proposes that
institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that can open up the way library and
information science researchers study and understand individuals’health information
practices. Institutional ethnography prompts library and information science practitioners,
students and scholars to differently frame their methods in order to take into account
“mechanisms of managerial control”(DeVault and McCoy, 2002, p. 26) and ways in which
“knowledge and power come together […] to organize what happens to people”(Campbell
and Gregor, 2002, p. 12). By drawing on an institutional ethnography study that made
visible family caregivers’health information work (Dalmer, 2018a), this paper highlights
institutional ethnography as a unique method of inquiry that simultaneously privileges
individuals’expertise of their health information practices while tracing the broad,
institutional forces that invisibly shape and guide those same information practices.
Institutional ethnography: an overview[1]
Institutional ethnography arose out of Smith’s frustrations with the deficiencies of
mainstream sociology, particularly sociological research’s tendency to make people the
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