Balancing Acts: Personal Health Narratives and Scientific Evidence in the Information Age

The personal health narratives shared across digital platforms often contain compelling, intimate firsthand accounts of illness and wellness, and can convey both meaningful lived experiences and misleading health information. These narratives represent a significant information evaluation challenge, especially for health librarians who are invested in cultivating lifelong information literacy skills and habits of mind that extend beyond the classroom or clinic.

This session will explore the intersection of health misinformation and narrative messaging, focusing on implications for information literacy instruction, and the development of more sophisticated information evaluation practices.

In this session, participants will explore how personal health narratives can serve as potent vectors for misinformation, while also coming to understand the importance of taking these narratives seriously as sources of health information. In navigating these tensions and contradictions, participants will begin to develop nuanced information strategies to uphold a commitment to both epistemic justice and evidence-based healthcare.

Presentation slides, as well as a bibliography/resource list will be made available after the session.

Resource URL: Pending

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• describe the role of personal narratives in spreading health misinformation and describe key characteristics that make these stories compelling and potentially misleading.
• identify approaches to combat misinformation while balancing epistemic justice and evidence-based healthcare principles.
• develop strategies to support the evaluation and integration of knowledge from diverse sources to promote a holistic approach to health information literacy.

Agenda

45 Minutes: Presentation

• Lecture-style presentation, broken up by interactive components where audience members are asked to respond or react to the concepts and ideas being presented.

30 Minutes: Information Evaluation Activity & Discussion

• Participants are guided through an abbreviated version of a source evaluation activity that focuses on integration of diverse information sources to evaluate a health claim

15 minutes: Final Discussion & Wrap Up

• Time is reserved for closing thoughts, from both presenter and participants, and review of further resources

MLA CE Credits: 1.5