What does the body know? Nursing students’ perspectives and epistemic beliefs about embodied health misinformation

Abstract

Academic health librarians are deeply invested in helping future healthcare professionals develop the information literacy skills necessary to navigate an increasingly fraught information landscape. In that vein, this poster presents initial results from a qualitative study exploring how nursing students contend with a particularly complex form of health misinformation. Specifically, this study investigates nursing students' perceptions and epistemic beliefs related to "embodied health misinformation" - the misinformation that arises in the messy intersection where bodily experiences conflict with biomedical evidence. In investigating how nursing students respond to this type of misinformation, the study aims to reveal how they engage with information outside of traditional scholarly evidence, challenging simplistic binaries in the study of misinformation. In doing so, this study contributes to the scholarly conversation around how health professionals’ information literacy practices can balance epistemic justice with a commitment to evidence-based health care. Objectives: The objective of this research is to explore nursing students' perceptions and evaluation of "embodied health misinformation" - misinformation that is woven into bodily experience, where an individuals’ intimate knowledge of their own body is positioned as more credible than biomedical evidence. Healthcare professionals need well-developed personal epistemologies to navigate these complexities, yet there's limited research into how they perceive this type of information. To fill that gap, this study asks: (1) What are nursing students' perspectives on the body as a source of health information and misinformation? and (2) What are nursing students' epistemic beliefs related to embodied health misinformation? Methods: This study follows a qualitative methodology, employing a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nursing students. In order to elucidate their thoughts on how to contend with bodily information when it appears to convey misinformation, participants are asked to respond to two conflicting information sources on the same topic: a personal health narrative that incorporates subjective, affective health experiences, and an evidence-based information source. The audio of the recorded interviews is transcribed and transcripts are coded inductively for emergent themes in the nursing students’ perspectives on bodily information, and deductively for any specific epistemic beliefs they reveal in their responses. Results: Preliminary results following the analysis of 6 interviews with undergraduate nursing students reveal key initial themes and topics that include: triangulation of bodily information with external sources of information; the practice of bodily listening; issues of individual vs. generalized health claims; and considerations of time and risk in evaluating health information. Conclusions: This project is ongoing, but it is anticipated that the results will contribute to broader conversations about the development of sensitive information evaluation practices among students who are entering health professions. Specifically, understanding nursing students’ perceptions and beliefs around embodied information can inform how librarians help prepare health professionals to contend with the full complexity of the health misinformation that they will encounter, as both information consumers and eventually, trusted sources of health information themselves.