Revisiting Farradane's relational indexing in a consumer health context

Farradane’s relational indexing system uses a psychological paradigm to establish a matrix of relationships between concepts, based on axes of association and discrimination. While the system has never been widely adopted in indexing, it provides a useful basis for the discourse analysis of consumer health information, particularly in relation to Alzheimer’s Disease. Using Farradane’s relational operators to analyze textual information provided both by medical professionals and by patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, this study found that gaps in medical knowledge about the causes of Alzheimer’s manifest themselves in the matrix as a tension between association and functional dependence. The testimony of Alzheimer’s patients, on the other hand, showed a tension between the self-activity and dimensional relationships: between intransitive activities, on the one hand, and a strong desire to tell the stories of their lives. Findings of the study suggest that Farradane’s relational system has the potential to identify important gaps between professional and consumer health information vocabularies, and to enhance the embedded relationships in consumer health Web information systems.