I write these pieces every 6 months. This one will be my ‘about my research’ contribution to the Applied Informatics research community gathering on Wednesday 11 February. (At previous Centre for Social Informatics all-centre gatherings I’ve been incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1] But this is mostly because I hate public speaking.) Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingMy research fits within the broad field of information science, so you might think that I’d be fascinated by information anywhere, all the time. But as far as my Type 1 diabetes is concerned, I’m an information avoider. I was curious to know more about this, especially after a presentation by Gunilla Widén.
Edinburgh Napier University funded a short project, supervised by Gemma Webster, to investigate information avoidance in young UK adults who have Type 1 diabetes. Some initial findings are on this poster. At the same time, Kristina Ericksson-Backa and Gunilla used the interview questions we’d devised to investigate this phenomenon in Finnish adults.
They have just published this paper (in which I’m third author) about their participants’ information behaviour – including avoidance – around diabetes. We all hope to undertake a larger study, and I really hope this would enable me to visit Finland!
Eriksson-Backa, K., Widén, G., & Ryan, B. (2022). Practices related to diabetes information in a group of Finnish adults living with Type 1 diabetes. Informaatiotutkimus, 41(2–3), 29–33. https://doi.org/10.23978/inf.122558
Ryan, B. M., & Webster, G. (2020, June). Information avoidance and diabetes – a preliminary empirical study. Poster presented at Information Science Trends: Health Information Behavior, online
Bruce's IT-ish world 