Health Information Seeking Behaviour Study in Bangladesh: Household Survey and Qualitative Study, 2012-2016

To explore the role of ICTs in health information seeking, the UK Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) jointly conducted two household surveys. The first, during March to May 2014 was in three locations of Bangladesh; Chakaria (a rural sub-district), Mirzapur (a peri-urban sub-district) and Dhaka (five largest slums of the capital city). The second survey in August 2015 was of students at colleges in Chakaria and Mirzapur to study the behaviour of presumed early adaptors of mobile phone based access to the internet. Qualitative methods were used to probe more deeply into the attitudes of people to different sources of health information and explore the process of diffusion of new types of health-information seeking behaviour. The first stage of qualitative work provided insights that both informed the final shape of the quantitative survey and provided qualitative data. Thereafter special studies examined in greater depth special areas of interest, such as individuals and groups with specific conditions or exemplifying emergent behaviours.This proposal is responding to the theme of "Information and Communication Technology and Development". Global access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is changing rapidly with the potential to impact on development in both positive and negative ways. One way of analysing the health sector is as a knowledge economy - how to access expert advice on how to manage a particular health problem and how to access specific commodities, such as drugs, which embody a large amount of research and development. Yet where does this access start? It starts with the individual or household making a decision to seek information - to seek the advice or find the commodities. In a resource poor household, how are such decisions made? In common with many of us, and the general human experience, 'Everyday Life Information-Seeking', is a mixture of sources: mediators - friends, family: finding information grounds (the local market) , and technology - going online, phoning a helpline, listening to the radio, accessing a library, etc. But for resource poor households what does that mix look like, and is it changing with the growth of ICTs? We know that poor households often have access to mobile phones and increasingly to the internet. Is this changing access changing the core behaviour of health information seeking? In this research we see three changing landscapes that could be affecting households choices. The health landscape is changing. New opportunities are opening up. In Bangladesh there are telephone helplines, local providers of health are sometimes networked in professional support, there are new private providers of healthcare. How does a household navigate these new opportunities? The ICT landscape is changing. Households have access to mobile phones. In many cases they have access to the internet. How much do they use these for seeking health information? Have they begun to use Google to self diagnose? Do they phone their distant cousins for advice, or are they still prioritising face-to-face contact? 'Information-seeking' itself is a changing (global) landscape. The world over we are creating new patterns of information-seeking. For instance, in developed countries the role of online social networks is a dominant channel. Are resource poor Bangladeshi households beginning to explore alternative information channels? Do they have a basic information literacy? Do the trust what they read in the newspapers, what they hear on the radio? Is the radio still a key channel for information or has it been replaced by the television? Our research will consider how these three changing landscapes interact with each other and while there are emerging bodies of work on each, there is very little that attempts to bring them together into a single conceptual framework supported by empirical research. This project, although focused on a single country, will explore different households in different resource settings to identify common approaches and decision-making patterns, to contribute to our understanding of how resource poor households are seeking health information in a changing world.