Everyday Life Information Research Articles

Human information behavior: Integrating diverse approaches and information use

AbstractFor millennia humans have sought, organized, and used information as they learned and evolved patterns of human information behaviors to resolve their human problems and survive. However, despite the current focus on living in an “information age,” we have a limited evolutionary understanding of human information behavior. In this article the authors examine the current three interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualizing how humans have sought information including (a) the everyday life information seeking–sense‐making approach, (b) the information foraging approach, and (c) the problem–solution perspective on information seeking approach. In addition, due to the lack of clarity regarding the role of information use in information behavior, a fourth information approach is provided based on a theory of information use. The use theory proposed starts from an evolutionary psychology notion that humans are able to adapt to their environment and survive because of our modular cognitive architecture. Finally, the authors begin the process of conceptualizing these diverse approaches, and the various aspects or elements of these approaches, within an integrated model with consideration of information use. An initial integrated model of these different approaches with information use is proposed.

Working Memory and Learning in Early Alzheimer?s Disease

Cognitive deficits associated with early Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been recently operationalised in terms of an acquisition deficit and the research supporting this view is presented. However, there is still debate concerning the nature of this deficit and how underlying cognitive processes may be detrimentally affecting the ability to acquire new information in early AD. This review argues that the pattern of cognitive deficits contributing to the acquisition impairment in early AD patients may be readily interpreted within the context of a working memory model. Isolating the component processes of working memory that underlie the acquisition deficit in early AD patients will aid in the design of clinical applications that are focussed at enhancing the ability to acquire new information in everyday life.

Constructing a Specific Culture: Young People's Use of the Mobile Phone as a Social Performance

This paper presents the main results of an exploratory qualitative study on the functions and meanings of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in young people's everyday life. Specifically, this study concerns teenagers' cultural ways of interpreting the mobile phone and its uses, as they become part of their social world. Through their accounts and narratives about 'young people's use of the mobile phone', teenagers construct their specific cultural model of this communication technology: it is seen as a radically social performance. Insofar as it is conceived as such, the mobile phone (MP) becomes a detonator of social thinking: it provokes reflective thinking on the ethics, etiquette and aesthetics of everyday action and social life. Reflecting upon the forms of use of the mobile phone, teenagers also explore the identity-making processes involved in the presentation of oneself on a public scene. In other words, they interpret and make the uses of the MP work as a social grammar through which people are supposed to define themselves and those around them. In this sense, using an MP in a teenage-appropriate way is not a matter of technical competence; it requires larger communicative skills that are cultural knowledge of when, where, why and, moreover, how to use this technology. Interpreted in the frames of teenagers' specific culture, the uses of the MP are also a tool for constructing the main dimensions of this culture and are used as a laboratory for the development of the skills needed to become competent members of their own community.

Unbreakable ethnic bonds: information-seeking behavior of Korean graduate students in the United States

Everyday life information seeking (ELIS) is a relatively new branch of user studies that examines information behavior in daily life activities. In this study, as an example of ELIS, Korean graduate students' everyday lives in the United States are explored, focusing on their perspectives with respect to main stream society and the role of their ethnic church in their everyday lives. This study combines the grounded theory method with in-depth interviews of eight students and their spouses, as well as participant observation and informal interactions with others. The findings showed two dissimilation mechanisms in the typical Korean student's information-seeking behavior: language barrier and the strong bonds in their ethnic church. Their limited English prevents them from interacting with American society, and the students gather within the ethnic community in settings such as the Korean church for the receipt of information for their ELIS and for social comfort. However, the church maintains strong ethnic bonds with the students by monitoring them and impeding their assimilation into American society.

Positioning theory and the negotiation of information needs in a clinical midwifery setting

AbstractStudies of everyday life information seeking have begun to attend to incidental forms of information behavior, and this more inclusive understanding of information seeking within broader social practices invites a constructionist analytical paradigm. Positioning theory is a constructionist framework that has proven useful for studying the ways in which interactional practices contribute to information seeking. Positions can construct individuals or groups of people in ways that have real effects on their information seeking. This article identifies some specific types of discursive positioning and shows how participants in a clinical care setting position themselves and one another in ways that justify different forms of information seeking and giving. Examples are drawn from an ongoing study of information seeking in prenatal midwifery encounters. The data consist of audio recordings of nine prenatal midwifery visits and of 18 follow‐up interviews, one with each participating midwife and pregnant woman. The midwifery model of care is based on a relationship in which the midwife provides the pregnant woman with information and support necessary for making informed decisions about her care. Midwife–client interactions are therefore an ideal context for studying information seeking and giving in a clinical encounter.

Use of narrative interviewing in everyday information behavior research

With an increasing focus on developing a theoretical understanding of everyday life information behaviors, researchers need to consider the appropriateness of the methods and techniques utilized in empirical research in this area. Progressively, studies articulate the need for a person-centered approach to researching human information behavior, yet research methods can be adopted that do not encourage the study participants to express freely their views and experiences. This article proposes that narrative and episodic interviewing techniques are qualitative research methods that sustain a person-centered paradigm of human information behavior and that provide a particularly useful methodological framework for studies of everyday life information-seeking behavior. Furthermore, the author discusses her own work-in-progress that involves narrative interviews.

Towards a contextual model of information seeking on the Web

This paper discusses everyday life information seeking via the World Wide Web, and its many contexts at various levels of abstraction. First, empirical Internet-searching studies are reviewed, the conclusion of which is the fact that they yield an exceedingly limited and fragmentary picture of the context of the activity. Therefore, the aim of the paper is theoretical: to propose – based on holistic reflection and earlier literature – a truly contextual model of Web searching from an individual's perspective. The various layers – life-worlds, domains, situations, action, information action, information seeking, information sources, Internet and Web – of the framework are presented one by one, and the dynamics of the whole creation is eventually outlined. At the end, the usefulness and application of the model are deliberated upon. It is claimed that the framework amounts to an exhaustive description of the context of Web information seeking, and that the theoretical construct can be taken advantage of in researching information seeking from practically any source.

Older adults' use of information and communications technology in everyday life

Social commentators in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States are beginning to recognise that encouraging older adults' use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is essential for the creation of bona fide information societies. To date, however, few studies have examined in detail older adults' access to and use of ICTs. This important aspect of the interaction between population ageing and societal change is more complex than the published literature's portrayal of a dichotomy between ‘successful users’ and ‘unsuccessful non-users’. The paper examines the extent and nature of ICT access and use by older adults in their everyday lives. Information was collected from a sub-sample of 352 adults aged 60 or more years taken from a large household survey of ICT use in England and Wales among 1,001 people. The findings suggest that using a computer is not only a minority activity amongst older adults but also highly stratified by gender, age, marital status and educational background. Conversely, non-use of computers can be attributed to their low relevance and ‘relative advantage’ to older people. The paper concludes by considering how political and academic assumptions about older people and ICTs might be refocused, away from trying to ‘change’ older adults, and towards involving them in changing ICT.

A model of information practices in accounts of everyday‐life information seeking

Many research‐based models of information seeking behaviour are limited in their ability to describe everyday life information seeking. Such models tend to focus on active information seeking, to the neglect of less‐directed practices. Models are often based on studies of scholars or professionals, and many have been developed using a cognitive approach to model building. This article reports on the development of a research‐based model of everyday life information seeking and proposes that a focus on the social concept of information practices is more appropriate to everyday life information seeking than the psychological concept of information behaviour The model is derived from a constructionist discourse analysis of individuals’ accounts of everyday life information seeking.

Apart from technology: understanding people’s non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life

Despite the high-profile nature of the current ‘digital divide’ debate, academic understanding of who is making little or no use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) remains weak. Indeed much of the discussion surrounding the digital divide has concentrated on the characteristics of those individuals who are using ICTs or, at best, simply pathologised the ‘have nots’ in terms of individual deficits. Yet developing a systematic and objective understanding of individuals’ non-use of new technologies constitutes a major challenge for those seeking to map and understand the social realities of the ‘information age’. The present paper, therefore, aims to develop a deeper conceptual understanding of people’s non-use of new technologies: firstly, by considering established discourses of why individuals may be excluded or peripheral to ICT use; and then, via a critique of these positions, proposing an alternative framework of why people may not use ICT in their day-to-day lives based around individuals’ ‘reading’ of technology.

On contexts of information seeking

While surprisingly little has been written about context at a meaningful level, context is central to most theoretical approaches to information seeking. In this essay I explore in more detail three senses of context. First, I look at context as equivalent to the situation in which a process is immersed. Second, I discuss contingency approaches that detail active ingredients of the situation that have specific, predictable effects. Third, I examine major frameworks for meaning systems. Then, I discuss how a deeper appreciation of context can enhance our understanding of the process of information seeking by examining two vastly different contexts in which it occurs: organizational and cancer-related, an exemplar of everyday life information seeking. This essay concludes with a discussion of the value that can be added to information seeking research and theory as a result of a deeper appreciation of context, particularly in terms of our current multi-contextual environment and individuals taking an active role in contextualizing.

The academic and the everyday: Investigating the overlap in mature undergraduates' information–seeking behaviors

This study uses in-depth qualitative interviews to explore the information seeking behavior of 25 mature undergraduates at one Canadian university. It explores the complex interweaving of these students’ everyday and academic information needs in light of Reijo Savolainen’s framework for the study of everyday life information seeking. Findings include the role of social and cultural capital in these students’ information seeking, the diverse ways that everyday and academic contexts inform one another, and the importance of not separating the everyday from other life situations in studies of individuals’ information behaviors.

Communication barriers and information-seeking counterstrategies in accounts of practitioner-patient encounters

Although practitioner-patient communication has been studied in several disciplines, few researchers have applied library and information science perspectives to this form of everyday life information seeking. This article reports findings from in-depth, semistructured interviews with pregnant women and uses a constructionist discourse analytic approach to analyze pregnant women’s accounts of practitioner-patient information-seeking encounters. The analysis focuses on accounts of communication barriers and on the active seeking and scanning practices that participants described as counterstrategies. This article also reports on the ways that descriptions of barriers and counterstrategies contribute to individuals’ representations of themselves as information seekers.

Using everyday life information seeking to explain organizational behavior

Everyday life information-seeking (ELIS) studies have previously addressed nonwork or citizens' information needs and seeking. This article contributes to the theoretical growth of the field by applying Chatman's small-world theory—a conception of ELIS—and social network theory to explain organizational behavior. The applicability of these two theories to analyze human information behavior in strategic value creation is discussed and shown through the results of an earlier pilot study in higher education. The concepts of social types, described as insiders and outsiders, worldview, social norms, information behavior, and trust are invoked. Combined with the concepts of homogeneity, density, and content from social network theory, Chatman's small-world theory yields a promising social dimension for a new theory of strategic information management. However, the conceptual base of the proposed new theory requires validation by testing in strategic partnerships.

Ageing and temporal processing of durations within the psychological present

The predominant use of temporal information in everyday life concerns behaviour within the psychological present, which is said to have an upper limit of approximately 3–5 s. The present study was designed to investigate age differences in processing of temporal information within the psychological present by applying three distinct psychophysical tasks with base durations of 1 s. Forty young (mean age: 21.6 years) and forty older adults (mean age: 70.4 years) were presented with a temporal discrimination task, a temporal reproduction task, and a repeated production task. Pronounced impairment in older adults, as compared to young adults, was found for temporal discriminations. When asked to reproduce a 1-s target interval, young adults under-reproduced and older adults over-reproduced the target duration, but did not differ in overall accuracy and intra-individual variability. Repeated productions of a 1-s interval were unaffected by age. These findings are consistent with the notion that older adults show impaired performance when stimulus timing is required, whereas response timing is unaffected by ageing.

Ageing and temporal processing of durations within the psychological present

The predominant use of temporal information in everyday life concerns behaviour within the psychological present, which is said to have an upper limit of approximately 3–5 s. The present study was designed to investigate age differences in processing of temporal information within the psychological present by applying three distinct psychophysical tasks with base durations of 1 s. Forty young (mean age: 21.6 years) and forty older adults (mean age: 70.4 years) were presented with a temporal discrimination task, a temporal reproduction task, and a repeated production task. Pronounced impairment in older adults, as compared to young adults, was found for temporal discriminations. When asked to reproduce a 1-s target interval, young adults under-reproduced and older adults over-reproduced the target duration, but did not differ in overall accuracy and intra-individual variability. Repeated productions of a 1-s interval were unaffected by age. These findings are consistent with the notion that older adults show impaired performance when stimulus timing is required, whereas response timing is unaffected by ageing.

Gaining access to everyday life information seeking

The discursive viewpoint adopted by many researchers who study everyday life information seeking allows for a shift in focus away from the individual as a unit of analysis toward a more general understanding of the broader cultural conditions within which individuals operate. However, the data employed by such researchers often consist of the testimony or observed actions of individuals. This paradox provides a point from which to reflect on the process of gaining access or entry to everyday life information seekers as research participants. This article presents the authors’ reflections on their experiences of conducting separate library and information science studies of three diverse populations: pregnant women, members of a self-help support group, and preschool children. The article’s premise is that theory and research practice are intertwined and that attending to issues of gaining access is essential for the development of both. Access is an emergent process dependent on the characteristics of the researcher, the participants, and the research context.

Discovered by chance: The role of incidental information acquisition in an ecological model of information use

The role of information which is incidentally or accidentally acquired has been neglected in the study of information-seeking behavior. The study reported in this article focused on “incidental information acquisition” as a key concept and investigated the information-seeking behavior of 202 older adults, aged 60 and over, from both metropolitan Melbourne and rural areas in the Australian state of Victoria. The approach to the study was ecological in the sense that a picture was built up of information seeking in the context of the lives of the people in the sample, both individually and collectively. A particular and unusual focus of the study was the role of telecommunications, especially the telephone, in information seeking. The implications for society's systems of information provision are discussed, together with ramifications of the finding that older people will be slower than other groups to accept computer-based sources of information for everyday life. Everyone has some set of habits or routines for keeping his internal model of the world up to date…. We have friends, relatives, work associates, and acquaintances to whom we talk regularly and with whom we exchange news and views. We have habits of reading and watching and listening to public vehicles of communication—newspapers, television, radio, magazines and books. These are not random, but patterned activities…. [I]nformation is in part acquired because it is deliberately sought…. It is also found where it is not specifically sought, as an accidental concomitant of routine activities with other purposes or as pure accident.… [I]t is clear that we could describe individual patterns of information-gathering activity, both where the search for information was the primary motive and where it was incidental….(Wilson, 1977, pp. 36–37).

Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in the context of “way of life”

The study offers a framework for the study of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) in the context of way of and mastery of life. Way of life is defined as the “order of things,” manifesting itself, for example, in the relationship between work and leisure time, models of consumption, and nature of hobbies. Mastery of life is interpreted as “keeping things in order;” four ideal types of mastery of life with their implications for ELIS, namely optimistic-cognitive, pessimistic-cognitive, defensive-affective and pessimistic-affective mastery of life are outlined. The article reviews two major dimensions of ELIS, there are. the seeking of orienting and practical information. The research framework was tested in an empirical study based on interviews with teachers and industrial workers, eleven of both. The main features of seeking orienting and practical information are reviewed, followed by suggestions for refinement of the research framework.

Uses of scientific, technical, and societal information by policy makers

The entire life cycle of scientific, technical, and societal information is changing, due both to new technologies and to enhanced awareness of the importance of information in everyday life. This article describes features undergoing change within the life cycle and presents two examples, illustrating how information is used in policy setting. Possible measures of the way in which the public policy development process uses scientific, technical, and societal information are proposed.