Communication barriers and information-seeking counterstrategies in accounts of practitioner-patient encounters

Abstract

Although practitioner-patient communication has been studied in several disciplines, few researchers have applied library and information science perspectives to this form of everyday life information seeking. This article reports findings from in-depth, semistructured interviews with pregnant women and uses a constructionist discourse analytic approach to analyze pregnant women’s accounts of practitioner-patient information-seeking encounters. The analysis focuses on accounts of communication barriers and on the active seeking and scanning practices that participants described as counterstrategies. This article also reports on the ways that descriptions of barriers and counterstrategies contribute to individuals’ representations of themselves as information seekers.