‘The Internet Both Reassures and Terrifies’: exploring the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story completion method

Abstract

Lay people are now encouraged to be active in seeking health and medical information and acting on it to engage in self-care and preventive health practices. Over the past three decades, digital media offering ready access to health information resources have rapidly expanded. In this article, I discuss findings from my study that sought to investigate health information practices by bringing together the social research method of story completion with more-than-human theory and postqualitative inquiry. Narratives of health, illness and embodiment are powerful ways to portray people’s experiences and identify the shared cultural norms and discourses that give meaning and context to these experiences. The research method of story completion is a novel approach to eliciting narratives that involve participants’ responses to hypothetical situations. Participants were asked to use an online questionnaire format to complete three stories involving characters faced with a different health problem. This approach sought to identify the human and non-human enabling resources with which the characters engaged as they tried to address and resolve their problem, with a particular interest in how both digital technologies and non-digital resources were used. This analysis highlighted the affective and relational dimensions of humans’ enactments of health, illness and embodiment. The stories surfaced the relations of sense-making, embodiment and care and how they are distributed between humans and non-humans. Agential capacities were closed off by elements such as too much information online creating confusion or anxiety, self-consciousness about the appearance of one’s body, feelings of embarrassment and shame, or not wanting to appear to be too weak or vulnerable. Capacities for change, wellness and recovery were opened by finding helpful information, making connections with others and finding therapeutic spaces and places.

Tactics, affects and agencies in digital privacy narratives: a story completion study

“…Others have highlighted aspects such as the vagueness of concerns people have about personal data use and privacy issues (Andrejevic, 2014). Numerous studies, however, highlight various forms of agencies exercised by people when making sense of how their personal data are used by third parties (Lupton, 2019a), including how visualisations direct public sense-making by giving "concrete physical form to abstract data" (Pentzold et al, 2019) and the practices taken up when people seek to improvise with (Lupton, 2019c;Pink and Fors, 2017) or "repair" their data (Pink et al, 2018b). This focus concerns how people tactically negotiate the ways that they "do" data in the everyday in order to exercise agency (Pybus et al, 2015;Lupton, 2019a) and to work with and knowingly affect algorithmic functions (Bucher, 2018).…”

“…Typically, this requires participants write down their completed stories, either using pen and paper or by typing into a digital format. Since first used in early 20th century psychodynamic research to investigate underlying properties of human behavior, the story completion method has been developed within feminist social psychology and related social constructivist fields to explore meaning-making and sociocultural discourses (Braun et al, 2019;Clarke et al, 2019;Kitzinger and Powell, 1995;Lupton, 2019c). Connected to the broader rise in narrative methods, story completion is also gaining some ground in sociology (Lupton, 2020b;2019c) and media studies (Lee, 2019), used to identify shared imaginaries, feelings and experiences.…”

“…With this view, the human is always "more-than" a discrete being. Humans relationally exist with and within dynamic assemblages of humans and nonhumans, including digital technological devices, systems and structures (Lupton, 2019c).…”

Qualitative Story Completion: Opportunities and Considerations for Health Research

“…Yet QSC remains little used in health research. The method has been used to explore health-related topics broadly, for example, psychological health or service provision (Moller & Tischner, 2019; Scholz, Bocking et al, 2020; Shah Beckley & Clarke, 2021; Shah-Beckley et al, 2020; Vaughan et al, 2022), healthy eating or weight loss (McDonald & Braun, 2022; Tischner, 2019), and health information seeking (Lupton, 2021a). There are very few examples of QSC research within the fields of nursing, medicine, health service research, and allied health (see Coultas et al, 2020; Diniz et al, 2020).…”

Co-constructing experiential knowledge in health: The contribution of people living with Parkinson to the co-design approach

“…EBCD can be applied through methods such as focus groups (Fucile, Bridge, CO-CONSTRUCTING EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE IN HEALTH Duliban, & Law, 2017) or narrative interviews (Locock et al, 2014). Unlike the story completion method, where individuals are given a predetermined fictional narrative opening to complete on their own (Lupton, 2019), narrative interviews are conversations where participants and researchers develop meaning together, in constant interoperation (Kelly & Howie, 2007). That is, they are a way of co-constructing uniqueness (Stewart & Koenig-Kellas, 2020), where the experiential knowledge obtained can be later used to change future selves (Andersen, Ravn, & Thomson, 2020).…”