For this week’s post I would like to focus look at two different practical approaches employed by Information Scientists towards information research methodologies and briefly outline the theories underpinning them.
I’ll begin with Louise Limberg’s research paper ‘Experiencing information seeking and learning: a study of the interaction between two phenomena’
Limberg suggests there are three ways of experiencing information seeking and use.
1)
Fact
Finding
2)
Balancing information to make correct choices
3)
Scrutinizing
and analysing
She refers to Phenomenography – which is an approach that explores the different ways that people experience and conceptualize phenomena in the world. She describes Phenomenography as both a set of theoretical assumptions and a methodology – I believe this is an important thing to note, not only to contextualize her research, but for the sake of the research itself. As we discussed in class, all too often do Information scientists take the role of impartial objective observers without being able to make an admission to the fact that they cannot escape their theoretical assumptions underpinning their research.
Limberg cites Marton (1994) when arguing that the Core Concept of ‘conception’ is not a cognitive structure but a way of being aware of something. She highlights Marton’s insistence that Phenomenography is not psychological in character as he claims an experience cannot be placed inside a person – it is a relation between a person and a specific phenomenon – and that the object of a researcher's focus is to account for one as much as the other. I find this approach very interesting, particularly because it ties in well with Barlow’s idea of information as a relationship which I discussed in my previous post.
Limberg also looks into Phenomenography’s assumptions about knowledge as always provisional and essentially qualitative – she states that becoming more knowledgeable about a subject implies a deeper and more complex understanding of a phenomenon on a qualitative level. Further to this, she cites Entwistle’s assertion that learning cannot be separated from learning content. This reinforces the idea of information as primarily a relationship between the person and the thing being interacted with and contrasts heavily with the cognitive approach (which places information outside of the user).
In order to illustrate this contrast, it’s useful to stress the distinction Limberg makes between conceptions that focus on what people experience (a first order perspective) and conceptions that focus on how someone thinks about a specific phenomenon.
The below table illustrates the contrast:
| Cognitive based - User Studies | Phenomenography |
| -a focus on the cognitive processes of the individual | -a focus on how people conceptualize phenomena in the world |
| A first order perspective | -a second order perspective |
Limberg employed a set of interviews and observation sessions of high school seniors for her research. In analyzing her research Limberg takes a hermeneutical approach. She adopts a focus towards analyzing the students’ information seeking and use and a focus towards their understanding of the subject matter.
Through a process of several cases of reading and reflexion, possible patterns and categories of conceptions to describe phenomena are discerned. The students’ conceptions of information seeking and use and their conceptions of subject matter where then compared.
Her research makes the following conclusions:
a)
Students’
conceptions of how to use and seek information is not independent of content.
b)
Interaction
between information seeking/use and learning primarily concerns the use of information
c)
Group
Patterns strongly influence both info seeking, information use and the learning
process.
The
fist conclusion contradicts the established view in the Information Sciences of
information seeking as a general process divorced from content.
The
second conclusion could also be interesting given that traditional forms of
user studies focus heavily on information seeking as opposed to information
use. Given that Limberg’s study looked into both information seeking and use to
arrive at this conclusion, it may have implications on the field of information
science to have a stronger focus on information use and bring a balanced
perspective to Information science research.
Finally,
it seems that a phenomenographical approach is well suited to researching the
influence of groups on information seeking and use – it would be interesting to
look into cognitive based user studies as a point of contrast to see how
effective a cognitive approach would be in researching the effects of groups on
information seeking, use and the learning process.
Interestingly, its focus is on the question of how theater professionals make sense of Shakespeare and it reveals some interesting facts about the information behavior of these professionals that I hardly think an individual focused research approach would be able to come to.
Dr Olsson’s findings revealed that participants attached a lack of importance to active information seeking with only a few who reported it as an important part of their sense-making. The few who did actively seek out academic literature relating to Shakespeare overwhelmingly described it as an activity they undertook in the background or between productions. Furthermore texts were far more likely to be chosen as the result of a personal recommendation from a colleague than active information seeking. Respondents describe that their colleagues or mentors and interactions during rehearsals were the greatest source of influence over their understanding of Shakespeare.
Such findings have serious implications for a field that seems to have put such a heavy emphasis on individual information behavior and active information seeking in the past.
What is of particular interest to me here however, is the methodology used to arrive at these findings. As with the theoretical underpinnings to the study, the methodology also drew from a variety of fields. It begun with Dervin’s life-line technique (admittedly a technique I’m not too familiar with) but became increasingly influenced by the less structured and conversational approach by Seidman. Dr Olsson mentioned during the lecture that initially respondents were reluctant to be interviewed by an academic, and this illustrated the kind of relationship that theater professionals had with literary academics. The interviewing technique allowed some respondents to feel like they hadn't even been in an interview, and such a framework allowed respondents to be more open and create less barriers during the interviewing process.
I believe there was more to it than this however, as something occurred to me when Dr Olsson, during the lecture, reported that some respondents even found it a very insightful interview which revealed a lot about themselves. To illustrate the point however, I'd like to refer to a philosopher I hold in very high regard: Donald Rumsfield.
Mr Rumsfield, despite his supreme understanding of how knowledge and information functions, does leave one component out in his classification of knowledge - That is, among the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, there is also the unknown knowns. That is, the ethical and sociopolitical prejudices that influence our actions without our even being conscious of them. Zizek illustrates this point in a talk at the 3:37 mark where he talks about ideology:
What particularly interests me here about Dr Olsson's methodology is its ability to reveal the ‘unknown knowns’ within its respondents. For the ability to reveal the underpinning assumptions and ideology behind an information behaviour is fundamental, I would argue, to understanding their relationship to information.
Sources
Buckland, M. (1991) Information as Thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42 (5), 351-360.
Olsson, M. (2009) Re-Thinking our Concept of Users. Australian Academic & Research Libraries 40 (1): 22-35.
Wilson, T. (2000). Human Information Behaviour. Informing Science 3 (1), 49-55.
No comments:
Post a Comment