“I Don’t Just Take Whatever They Hand to Me”: How Women Recently Released from Incarceration Access Internet Health Information

Abstract

Women transitioning from incarceration often reenter society with multiple barriers to affordable health care. Many resort to costly emergency department visits, and others turn to online health information to compensate for gaps in their health care. Interviews with 74 previously incarcerated women were conducted in 2019–2020 in three midwestern cities. Qualitative and quantitative analysis revealed that, while most participants used the internet for health information, their perceptions of the reliability varied. Many participants expressed a need for additional reliable sources of health information and ways to verify it. These findings support the importance of high-quality digital health literacy interventions.

Keywords:

• Digital literacy
• health information
• health literacy
• incarcerated
• underserved women

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors have no known conflicts of interest or competing interests to declare. There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

ETHICAL APPROVAL

The research was approved by the University of Kansas Office of Research Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Human Participants, IRB ID Number: STUDY00144048, approval letter dated May 7, 2019.

FUNDING

This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Number: 1907002).

Notes

1 Chrome” is a web browser owned by Google. References to Chrome as a search engine nominally refer to the use of the default search engine/address bar/omnibox included on the Chrome browser, which is the Google search engine.

2 Safari” is a web browser owned by Apple. References to Safari as a search engine nominally refer to the default search engine/address bar/omnibox included on the Safari browser.

3 “Siri” is an artificially intelligent personal assistant app owned by Apple and available on iPhones. It functions as a search engine in that it looks up online information, using Apple proprietary methods.

4 The researchers did not find relevant URLs with Pill Finder or Pill Identifier, as their second-level domain. The name Pill Finder or Pill Identifier describe a type of webpage or web-based service that helps users identify manufactured pills based on the pills appearance, including shape, size, and color(s).

5 The researchers did not find a relevant website by this name, except mdhelp.net which was part of a medical practice in another state, and therefore appeared to be unlikely to be the one intended by the participant.

6 The researchers concluded that My Quest referred to a webpage entitled My Quest with the url: https://www.questdiagnostics.com/home/physicians/healthcareit/quanumsolutions/myquest/.

7 Excludes 4 participants who did not report their educational attainment. For comparison, according to the US Census Bureau (2019), 90.5% of all US adult women have educational attainment of high school graduate or above.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Number: 1907002).