Meaning making within the social activity domain of health maintenance : the role of social networks

This research explores how people embedded in their social networks actively engage in human meaning making about information and issues of health. Framed by a theoretical perspective of literacy as socially situated, it sought to investigate the ways that social network interactions mediate meaning making within the social activity domain of health maintenance. Using an ethnographic research design and a social network analysis orientation, this study explores patterns of social interaction and both macro- and micro-level aspects of social relations as they occur within socially situated contexts. Data collection involved social network surveys, interviews, field notes, transcribed spontaneous talk, and the focal participant’s health maintenance literacy practices diary from December 2011 to December 2012. Analysis of data included a social network analysis approach that gave macro level insights into the social structure of networks, as well as ethnographic qualitative analysis that explored the meanings by which participants understood and constructed their life worlds and the social meanings they linked to health information exchanges. Analysis revealed how exchanges of health information within social networks were accomplished primarily through oral interactions, and how multiple individual and social factors intersected to create patterns of knowledge construction and meaning making around health information and issues in social network interactions. Insights drawn from the data analysis also illustrated the ways health information flows through social networks that were shaped by different gradients of institutional and relational power dynamics. These results of the analysis suggested that the processes of making meaning around health information and issues cannot be extricated from structures of power and the social networks within which these processes occur.Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofGraduat