Home Health Nursing Information Behavior in a Historic Time of Pandemic: Shifting Taxonomic Facets

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected information-based applications that became critical tools for survival. Nursing information behavior (NIB) during the pandemic was analyzed through textual data culled from news videos and interviews with frontline homecare nurses in terms of how they practiced home care in the midst of COVID-19. Did the NIB conceptual framework change for nurses during COVID-19? There were shifts in concentrations in the taxonomic facets during the pandemic. The present study aimed to explain the contextual changes in emphasis in the various processes and taxonomic facets in home health nursing, as influenced by the pandemic. Outcomes of the qualitative analysis of video transcripts offer the readers an understanding of how nurses adapted to the pandemic. Co-word analysis of the video transcripts was used to map twenty new terms to the Core Taxonomy-NIB (CT-NIB). The addition to the core taxonomy of an emotive layer combined with pandemic-specific nursing practices suggests certain shifts, cultural and otherwise, in NIB. The significance of this research lies in the “intertwining” of knowledge organization (KO) and NIB—two disciplines creating a synergistic effect to not only describe the effect of the pandemic but also to advance the knowledge base of home health nursing.