Community information as boundary object: police responsibility for abuse survivors

Abstract

Purpose -Working toward a symbolic interactionist understanding of information provision by multiple agencies responding to crisis situations, in this paper the authors aim to examine mandated information provision on the part of US law enforcement to survivors of intimate partner violence. Design/methodology/approach -The authors conducted a detailed content analysis of 1,793 documents supplied by local law enforcement agencies from over 700 cities from all 50 US states. Documents were coded within a framework that identified 18 information elements corresponding to four emergent situations commonly found within the survivors' small world, as well as codes to note level of responsibility expressed by law enforcement and affective tone. Findings -Law enforcement expressed the greatest responsibility for those information elements related to their immediate purview -generally, how to engage with the police themselves in an initial crisis situation. However, information related to community social services, related to "later" survivor situations was included in the documents almost as frequently, but with less expressed direct responsibility. Originality/value -Agencies providing information to survivors of crisis situations are frequently working within an environment that is bounded by overlapping governmental and private actors who may have different norms, agendas, and priorities. Developing a symbolic interactionist model that allows for the co-existence of these different approaches, and articulates their interaction, can help IS professionals support these actors who may be struggling with minimal preparation for information interactions.

Boundary objects in information science

“…Godbold (2012) identified an element of the BO, its useful vagueness, to show how personal narratives on online discussion groups became recognizable and vague enough to fit in a general way with the situations of discussion group readers. Westbrook and Finn (2012) showed that this vagueness is not always helpful. They found that tensions may arise as a result of the distinct priorities and perspectives that each member of a broad network of community partners brings to the problem of intimate partner violence (IPV).…”

“…BOs can be identified in diverse 'informational' situation within which their vagueness turns to an asset. The line between being vague enough and too indefinite is fine and as, for instance, the example of Westbrook and Finn (2012) shows, BOs can fail. Even if the BOs are fallible and in a constant process of (re-)making, the review shows that the recent theoretical shift in information behavior research towards the notion of information practices has increased the relevance of the notion and its usefulness as an analytical lens for explicating continuities and discontinuities of collaborative information activities.…”

“…The characteristics of artefacts that turn them to informative socio-material forms in the practices of sharing, disseminating, reusing and exchanging information (e.g. theoretical understanding of their nature as in Albrechtsen & Jacob, 1998; artefacts have different levels of interpretation in Huvila, 2011); in how the vagueness of BOs can be both an advantage (Godbold, 2012) and disadvantage (Westbrook & Finn, 2012); in how the meta-discursive ability increases the flexibility of documents as BOs and informative socio-material forms (Huvila, 2011); and in how different modes of representation (of how documents are represented) and informative configurations (ways in which users engage with documents) affect their use (Björk, 2015). 2.…”

“…Huvila, 2011Huvila, , 2012Huvila, , 2016Lund, 2009), social and community informatics (e.g. Westbrook & Finn, 2012;Worrall, 2013;Fleischmann, 2006) and computer supported cooperative work (e.g. Roth & McGinn 1998;Light & Anderson, 2009).…”

“…activities (Macpherson et al, 2006) archival standards (Yakel, 2004) cancer (as a conceptual artefact) (Fujimura, 1992) community information (Westbrook & Finn, 2012) concepts (Langenohl, 2008;Ridenour, 2016) design concepts (Eriksson, 2008) digital literacy (Huvila, 2012b) documents (Huvila, 2012;Østerlund, 2008a) gender (Burnett et al, 2009) genre (Østerlund, 2008b) group affiliations (Lindberg & Czarniawska, 2006) information services (Huvila, 2012b) medicine (Frost et al, 2002) metaphors (Koskinen, 2005) methods (Olsen et al, 2012) musical scores (Winget, 2008) ontologies (Shepherd & Sampalli, 2012) policies (Emad & Roth, 2009) repositories and digital libraries (Star & Griesemer, 1989;Van House, 2003;Worrall, 2015) room / space (Jornet & Steier, 2015) technical standards, geographic information systems (GIS) (Harvey & Chrisman., 1998) visual representations (Henderson, 1991) water (Carroll, 2012) Organized along disciplinary lines in the fields of anthropology of design, sociology of science, and organization theory, Trompette & Vinck (2009) offer a partial inventory of research topics for which the concept BO was put to use. Their review takes account of the diverse authorship and research applications of the concept and although it is not a critical review of the literature it provides a topical map.…”