Becoming the expert constructing health knowledge in epistemic communities online

Abstract

From a discourse analytic framework, the article analyses health blogs and patient's forum discussions in which parents to children with congenital heart defects recontextualize medical professional knowledge and share their own experiences. The study show how the two types of online media may serve as a means for parents to attain expert status in their own case by sharing lay knowledge expressed as an amalgamation of the two key perspectivesprofessional and experiencedas an indivisible unit. Monological discourses, such as narrating, in blogs and more direct and immediate responses in forum discussions are noted as examples of differences in how medical facts are explained and negotiated, how advice is provided and how patient expertise is created. The study also show how blogs and especially forum discussions are used to problematize the validity of actions and opinions of medical staff. The role of developing patient expertise in epistemic communities online may therefore come with a risk of spreading misrepresentation of medical cases.

Is it all about storytelling? Living and learning hereditary cancer on Twitter

“…In line with Akrich's (2010) work, Bellander and Landqvist (2018) have shown that patients' and carers' health blogs and forum discussions also lead to the emergence of epistemic dynamics. In particular, the authors identify epistemic dynamics in the way traditional expert knowledge is absorbed, confronted and used by those traditionally defined as 'lay' people (e.g.…”

“…Twitter) or platform areas (e.g. Facebook open groups) that require less personal commitment than the dedicated digital spaces investigated in previous research, for example, health discussion lists (Akrich, 2010) or carers' blogs and forums (Bellander and Landqvist, 2018). In other words, it allows one to test whether within the fluid publics -typical of these open contexts -communities may originate.…”

Drawing the Line between Sick and Healthy: Normality Constructions in Health Communication Contexts

“…For instance, we have shown, in earlier studies within this project, that parents of children with heart conditions take great responsibility for their child's health and actively seek knowledge that will help them take critical decisions and provide care (e.g. Bellander & Landqvist, 2019;Nikolaidou & Bellander, 2019). Similarly, in a study relating difficulties in parenthood to shame, Hanell (2017) shows how parents can adopt a deficit view of their parental skills when not abiding by ideological norms related to breastfeeding.…”

“…resistance to and re-construction of the traditional construction of normality, often due to parents' own experience or the perception of other conflicting norms, such as free choices and neo-liberal discourse. Norms may also be conceptualized as expert norms, either attributed to professionals or to laymen, so called 'layman expertise' (Bellander & Landqvist, 2019;Prior, 2003).…”

Bipolar patients and creative online practices: Sharing experiences of controversial treatments

“…Blogs may help facilitate collective processes of knowledge production by bringing together people with the same diagnosis but endowed with different types of knowledge, skills, and resources, by facilitating their dialogue, and by preserving their exchanges. They are important to study, since “[h]ealth issues are today often negotiated in parallel with professionals in institutional settings like hospitals and among peers in activities taking place online” (Bellander and Landqvist, 2018: 1).…”