Information Needs of Adults Living with Type 2 Diabetes: When Cookbooks Are More than Just Recipes.

Adults managing life with Type 2 diabetes may receive material about diabetes and management, or they may seek health information. They may also keep information items in the home for subsequent use. Currently, health technology is striving to push topically relevant information items, but successful technology would deliver unique, but relevant information. Thus, a holistic view of kept information items, item uses, and information needs are required. Research of information needs, seeking, and use (INSU) often views information needs as explicit statements, but latent information needs may also exist. Kept and used information items may serve to project these implicit information needs. This exploratory study aimed to identify both explicit and implicit information needs of adults living with Type 2 diabetes. Semi-structured interviews conducted in 21 participant's homes focused on kept and used items (n = 300). Resulting rich narratives provided insight of context, item acquisition, and item usage. The results indicate that the majority of items kept and used to manage life with diabetes are paper based and pertain to nutritional management. However, items and their abundance also projected information needs. These findings and their implications contribute to discussions of diabetes-related collections development and health information technology tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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