they progress.
Between opportunities and risks, this first chapter provides elements for understanding the changes underway for all of the actors in scientific and technical information (STI) within the health field.
Chapter 2, written by Céline Paganelli and Viviane Clavier, offers a methodological contribution aimed at characterizing health information by studying the information practices of health professionals and the organization of knowledge. Thus, returning to the documentary perspective, which approaches treatments according to their uses, health information is presented as strongly linked to contexts of use and practices. Based on the results of field studies and corpus analyses conducted in the field of health for more than 10 years, the researchers propose to rediscuss the contours of health information and put forward elements that allow it to be characterized.
The following chapters aim to understand how actors, whether professionals or citizens, inform themselves, how questions of evaluation of the information collected arise in a sector where the reliability of information is crucial and how health literacy can be considered in digital environments or in relation to specific populations.
In Chapter 3, Eloria Vigouroux-Zugasti, Olivier Le Deuff and Amar Lakel propose a reflection on health literacy in digital information environments. A concept that appeared in the early 1970s, in parallel with that of information literacy, health literacy goes far beyond the framework of informational or media skills and is becoming, particularly with the evolution of health information provision, a public health issue and challenge. In this chapter, the authors question digital health literacy based on the results of field studies: an automatic analysis of web corpora containing health information, as well as a longitudinal qualitative survey on online health practices among a retired population, using digital technologies. The results highlight several trends: the dominant place of the press and health professionals in the health information available on the Internet and the very minor voice of patients. They also show the need for users to develop skills that will enable them to be more comfortable when searching for health-related information.
Digital health literacy covers a variety of skills (informational, digital, media-related, health-related, etc.) that are difficult to evaluate because they require regular updating. The acquisition of these skills is a matter of training, as well as of mediation mechanisms, the reinforcement of which, by relying on health professionals and mediation actors, seems to be a necessity. However, beyond the aspects relating to training and mediation, the chapter clearly shows that public health policies must take up the issue of digital health literacy insofar as it constitutes a major challenge for therapeutic education.
Chapter 4 is written by two Finnish researchers from the discipline of Library and Information Science: Kristina Eriksson-Backa and Stefan Ek. These researchers are interested in the health information behavior of older people – their interests, the sources they use, the reliability criteria given to information sources, etc. – and propose methods to assess their level of health information literacy and medical knowledge. The notion of information behavior is borrowed from Tom Wilson4 and the empirical results were obtained through a survey sent by mail to 1,000 Finns aged 65–79 years. A total of 281 responses were completed and returned by a majority of women (57%), almost half of whom were aged 65–69 years and had an intermediate level of education (44%).
Health information literacy refers to skills related to information literacy, the ability to recognize a need for health information, evaluate and use this information in daily life to make good health decisions, use information ethically and legally and so on. Most studies relate literacy levels to the age of individuals and their ability to read and understand health-related materials. There are many questionnaires designed to measure health literacy. Recent studies have shown an association between low health literacy, poorer health status and increased use of hospital care. Conversely, better health literacy could be an important factor in the adherence to prescribed treatments. One of the contributions of the authors’ research is to highlight a link between the mastery of health information and the perception of patients when communicating with health professionals.
The next two chapters address issues of prevention in health information and communication.
Thus, Chapter 5, written by Cécile Loriato, proposes to study information on HIV/AIDS prevention from the perspective of the categorization of audiences and the hierarchization of actors in the journalistic narrative. Since the end of the 2000s, new biomedical prevention tools have been proposed, including Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), which is used for HIV prevention by HIV-negative people and is mainly recommended for men who have sex with men (MSM). The publicization of PrEP has sparked controversy around homosexuality, HIV and risk because it calls into question years of prevention based on condom use as the only known and effective tool. In this context, the researcher studies the construction of the journalistic narrative on biomedical prevention. She examines, on the one hand, the use of epidemiological categories to designate people at risk and, on the other hand, the hierarchical structure of the journalists’ account of prevention, in order to understand how this contributes to the total or partial exclusion of certain actors, actions, events or problems. The results show that information on biomedical HIV/AIDS prevention is constructed mainly from the point of view of scientific experts and mobilizes mostly stigmatizing epidemiological categories.
Through this analysis, the researcher contributes to the characterization of media information on prevention. Journalistic discourse on prevention gives a predominant place to scientific expertise. Indeed, the views on the biomedical prevention strategies of doctors and researchers specializing in HIV/AIDS are predominant, while the views of associations and users of these means of prevention are hardly heard. This reliance on experts can be explained in part by the fact that some journalists are not very close to the field of HIV/AIDS, which leads them to give preference to information from the communication services of medical or health institutions which have institutional legitimacy.
Chapter 6, written by Aude Chauviat, also addresses prevention information, as disseminated in prevention campaigns. She situates her argument in a particular historical context, that of the National Prohibition campaign in the United States (1919–1933). Based on content analysis of a corpus of more than 200 pamphlets published by the Anti-Saloon League, as well as a sub-corpus of 82 pamphlets mobilizing health information and created for the most part by the Scientific Federation for Temperance, she shows how health information was mobilized in the prevention campaign against alcohol to the detriment of a moralistic approach to the issue. She postulates that this shift to a preventive discourse based on health information is similar to a form of medicalization of alcohol-related problems and marks an evolution towards a medical approach to health, made possible by the acquisition of legitimacy of scientific discourse among the general public.
This contribution proposes a contextualized approach to health information. While anti-alcohol prevention campaigns rely more on specialized information, it is because for one, the discipline and international scientific community specializing in the question of alcohol is becoming institutionalized and more structured, and in parallel, popularized scientific discourses aimed at the American population are emerging.
Finally, the last two chapters address health information from the perspective of knowledge organization and representation.
Chapter 7 presents the testimony of Dr. Four, a private practitioner specializing in ophthalmology, on the role played by professional journals in updating medical knowledge for the practice of his profession. This testimony is very instructive for research
