Talking with You: Exploring Interpersonal Information-Seeking
Our investigation of the everyday information behavior of tweens (children aged 9-13) is part of a larger study entitled Talking with You: Exploring Interpersonal Information-Seeking, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. This larger study focuses specifically on why people turn to other people for everyday information ranging from finding new jobs and lower mortgages to health care, housing, child care, social activities, and other aspects of daily life. From over thirty populations, tweens were spe-cifically chosen for their conceptual interest: it was hypothesized that rich insights would be obtained from a population that has been nurtured from birth to seek information interpersonally and that is Shoes Online at a life juncture of becoming independent from the adult-oriented family/school structure but that also is marked as society’s most technologically savvy generation. It was further hypothesized that tweens would engage in media-rich interpersonal information-seeking behavior, using all available synchronous and asynchronous media (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, e-mail, Web pages, instant messaging, forums, blogs, and Wikis).
The research was informed by several information and everyday-life theories, including Brenda Dervin’s sense-making [38, 39]), Elfreda Chat-man’s normative behavior [40], and Karen Fisher’s information grounds [41], as well as the principles of everyday information behavior discussed by Roma Harris and Patricia Dewdney [42] and Donald Case [43]. Sense-making, providing the base notes for the larger study of why people turn to other people for information, was pivotal in identifying the main concepts of interest, that is, information needs/gaps, information-seeking strategies, barriers, uses, and outcomes. The micro-moment interview technique was Discount Shoes used to structure the exit interviews with the tweens. Chatman’s work was key on several levels, beginning with her orienting concept of small worlds. Borrowed from sociologists Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luck-mann [44] and Manfred Kochen [45], she defined a small, ivorld as one in which “everyday happenings occur with some degree of predictability” and where “legitimized others” share conceptual and physical space and thus shape social norms around information and other behaviors [40, p. 3]. As explained in her 2000 keynote address at the Information Seeking in Context conference in Sweden, her research prompted development of three related frameworks for explaining everyday-life information behavior: the theory of information poverty, the theory of life in the round, and the theory of normative behavior.
In simplest form, these frameworks can be considered as progressing from a small world, in which information-sharing is not conducted openly and in a healthy regard but rather is highly secretive and hoarding in manner due to a paucity and high cost of information (“information poverty”); to a mixed open/closed environment, where whether an individual seeks, avoids, or shares information depends on circumstances marked by large degrees of imprecision (“life in the round”); to an open, healthy setting, where information-seeking is viewed as a normal activity except under unusual circumstances that are caused by behavior sanctioned by the group (“life in the norm”).
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