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Objective: This qualitative research examines how transgender and gender nonbinary (T/GNB) persons from South Carolina navigate informational barriers within healthcare systems. This navigation can be described through the lens of information practices, or how T/GNB participants create, seek, use, and share information to achieve desired healthcare outcomes. Special focus is given to the roles of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in shaping these practices.Materials and Methods: The research utilizes participant data from semistructured interviews and focus groups conducted with 26 T/GNB individuals focusing on their health information practices. Data analysis utilized emic/etic coding and the constant comparative method to identify themes describing transexclusionary information barriers and respondent ICT-led information practices.Results: Findings note healthcare systems producing cisnormativity by design resulting in T/GNB individuals viewing healthcare spaces as exclusionary. Exclusionary barriers included over reliance on medical, expert authority ignoring T/GNB embodiment, and a lack of contextual perspective to identities. In response, T/GNB seek, create, use, and share information via ICTs to challenge exclusionary practices.Discussion: T/GNB ICT use addresses systemic barriers within healthcare systems suggesting a need to reframe healthcare systems through the lens of design justice, one that values T/GNB agency in understanding and producing health knowledge.Conclusion: While many healthcare providers are not intentionally being transexclusionary, the design of healthcare information systems rely on cisnormative values, thus excluding many T/GNB from accessing healthcare in comfortable and safe ways. Shifting toward the values and practices of T/GNB as informed by ICT use will afford healthcare providers ways to undo barriers to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this multi-platform study, I analyze interviews with 30 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals in the United States (U.S.) to demonstrate how social networking sites (SNS) and search engines afford and constrain their identity work. Data analysis identifies three key affordances and constraints for how participants create, negotiate, and sustain their LGBTQ+ identities: identity expression, visibility, and anonymity. I explore each using a tripartite analytical frame of stigma, tactics, and authenticity. Findings describe how participants navigate hetero- and gender-normative discourses encoded into SNS and search engines to affirm their LGBTQ+ identities. Designers can use these results to create platforms inclusive of LGBTQ+ identities that afford, rather than constrain, these navigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Q&A (SQA) has rapidly grown in popularity, impacting people's information seeking behaviors. Although previous research has examined how people seek and share information within SQA, fundamental questions of user motivations and expectations for information seeking remain. This paper applies the theoretical framework of uses and gratification theory to investigate the motivations for SQA use, and adapts relevance criteria from library and information science (LIS) literature to investigate expectations with regard to evaluation of content within Yahoo! Answers. A total of 75 Yahoo! Answers users participated in a survey that asked them about reasons, methods, and expectations relating to asking questions within the SQA site. Findings indicate the importance of motivations and expectations in fulfilling both cognitive and socio--affective needs based upon the type of task performed. These findings provide encouraging evidence that understanding the interrelationship between the motivations behind and expectations of asking a question can inform a more holistic framework to assess information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]