Information Grounds and Micro Information Seeking: Unpacking the Complexities of Community Education and Recruitment in Breast Cancer Screening Service Delivery

Public health education is an important part of national health systems that is intended to have a positive impact on the health behaviours of citizens and prevent health problems developing that require costly interactions with the acute health care system. In this paper we report findings from a twelve month ethnographic case study that collected observation, document/artefact and semi- structured interview data related to the information activities involved in community education work, specifically the targeted delivery of breast cancer information to relevant parts of a demographically defined community. We applied Leckie et al's (1996) model of the information behavior of professionals to highlight specific characteristics of different tasks and environments involved in professional breast cancer information delivery. The two main contributions of the paper are 1. an analysis of the way information grounds are both sought and leveraged in order to distribute information in breast cancer information delivery, and 2. the importance of (and understanding of) micro-information seeking in leveraging information grounds.