The Burden of Being Special: Adding Clarity about Communicating to Researching and Serving Users, Special and Otherwise

Dervin, Brenda; Reinhard, CarrieLynn D.; Kerr, Zack Y.

doi:10.1016/s0065-2830(06)30007-4

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Undoing nominalization by verbing and including “every verb of individual and collective sense‐making” (Dervin, 1999, p. 732) as evidence does not produce alternative science; it simply removes the power to discriminate. SMM's pluralistic and post‐modern stance, and tilting at scientific norms (e.g., Dervin, Reinhard, & Kerr, 2006, p. 245), is disingenuous, however, because, when it suits, SMM practitioners do work within the apparatus of traditional science. The 2007 study of affect and sense making (Dervin & Reinhard, 2007a, 2007b) can serve as an example.…”

Section: Nomenclaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Confessional methods and everyday life information seeking

Davenport

2010

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

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Section: Nomenclaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Confessional methods and everyday life information seeking

Davenport

2010

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

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“…These schemes have been tested in numerous studies achieving reliability percentages of 85% of above, even with strict beyond chance calculations. (Dervin, Reinhard et al, 2006). The four SMM focus group phases yielded a great deal of data in 105 minutes: 29 informants described 101 sourceusing helpfulness outcomes: 25 from quick, 47 from thorough, 29 from instead of library searches.…”

Section: Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep, efficient, and dialogic study of undergraduate information seeking and use: A methodological exploration

Dervin

Devakos

2010

Proc. Am. Soc. Info. Sci. Tech.

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Our purpose is to present the rationale and results of a pilot study applying a meta-theoretically derived approach to focus group or semi-structured group interviewing as a means of obtaining deep data efficiently and dialogically. The project was designed to meet needs of both the senior author (a methodologist) and junior author (a librarian). The exemplar was undergraduate information seeking and use for meeting class assignments. Particular focus was on understanding when and why students decided between quick internet-only versus thorough searches involving multiple sources. The focus group approach was informed by Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM). Emphasis for this presentation is methodological --to describe the approach and to illustrate the potentials for group interviewing. Empirical results provided here are for illustration only. The pertinent literature review emphasizes methodological sources. The authors are collecting more data from a range of different academic informants and expect to develop empirically anchored reports in the near future. KeywordsInformation seeking and use, focus group interviewing, semi-structured group interviewing, sense-making, methodology, undergraduates LINK TO FIGURESThis paper refers to figures that we have incorporated in a full version of this paper on a web-site at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sensemaking/asist2010poster.pdf THE CHALLENGE OF FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWINGFocus group interviewing has become increasingly popular (Morgan, 2002) as it allows researchers and practitioners a relatively inexpensive and rapid method of getting a handle on a question of interest. Numerous writings attend to multiple focus group theories and practices. These emphasize primarily theories of interpersonal, intergroup, intercultural, and trans-border communication. These writings also offer various examples for practice, usually in formulaic ways.Despite this attention, there is very little work that actually theorizes interviewing as communication practice (Briggs, 1986;Dervin & Foreman-Wernet, 2003;Dervin, 2008). Instead the emphasis is on gaining apriori understandings of cultures and group dynamics rather than specific theoretically-guided procedures of communicating that acknowledge how communicating works. Dervin calls the former "noun" approaches to interviewing. The SMM approach focuses interviewing practice on asking queries that address not only how informants define things but how they see themselves moving and bridging gaps from one situated sensemaking instance to another. This SMM "verbing " approach to interviewing mandates a dialogic structuring where the informant is invited as theorist to not only describe his/her material and phenomenological worlds but to ascribe causes and outcomes. Two central mandates drawn from SMM's philosophic underpinnings include: a) disciplining communicating with prescribed talking and listening turn-takings; and b) limiting spontaneity in order to constrain the impact of powerful interests and habitual commun...

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Information behavior

Fisher

Julien

2009

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

106

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IntroductionInformation behavior focuses on people's information needs; on how they seek, manage, give, and use information, both purposefully and passively, in the varied roles that comprise their everyday lives. Since the first ARIST chapters in the 1960s, the field of information needs and uses has expanded beyond studying academics and scientists to addressing non-work-related situations, employing mixed empirical methods, building a conceptual core for framing information behavior studies, and identifying key concepts for future investigation. This chapter reviews information behavior research published since Case's (2006) review, spanning the years 2005 to early 2008 and backpedaling to include several works from 2004. In addition to searching bibliographic databases, manual examinations were conducted of such key journals as further developed through solicitations on the ASIST SIG USE and ASIST listservs, which helped identify works in press. As Case (2006) noted, information behavior is a broad field that in its widest interpretation includes just about any paper that deals with information and people. In order to focus and manage the review, we excluded papers that limited themselves to the use of a particular source or system, did not encompass broader concepts or principles, and generally excluded other information science subfields such as information retrieval, information literacy, and knowledge management. We also excluded material written in languages other than English.Candidate papers were further limited to the formally published literature; we excluded reports to funding agencies and self-published papers. Beginning with an overview of the research methods used in post-2004 studies, this chapter traces the information behavior literature by discussing the theme of context, followed by elaborations of specific populations (academics, scientists, and students; occupational groups; and ordinary people in everyday life situations and health contexts), information sources (interpersonal, social networks and the Internet, and libraries), key concepts (including affect), and finally, theoretical frameworks. Case's (2006) chapter is recommended reading for an overview of past coverage of information behavior in ARIST. The current chapter is intended to complement cognate reviews on activity theory and information seeking (Wilson, 2008), multitasking behavior (Spink, Cole, & Waller, 2008), human geography and information studies (Downey, 2007), personal information management (Jones, 2007), scientific collaboration (Sonnenwald, 2007), context in information behavior research (Courtright, 2007), workplace 7-3 studies and technological change (Garcia, Dawes, Kohne, Miller, & Groschwitz, 2006), collaborative information seeking and retrieval (Foster, 2006), information failures in health care (MacIntosh-Murray & Choo, 2006), the social world of the Web (Haythornthwaite & Hagar, 2005), and children, teenagers, and the Web (Large, 2005). Method in Information Behavior ResearchThe methods used in recent info...

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The Burden of Being Special: Adding Clarity about Communicating to Researching and Serving Users, Special and Otherwise

Cited by 4 publications

References 52 publications

Confessional methods and everyday life information seeking

Confessional methods and everyday life information seeking

Deep, efficient, and dialogic study of undergraduate information seeking and use: A methodological exploration

Information behavior

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