The home buying experience: the impacts of time pressure and emotion on high stakes deciders information behavior

The purpose of this study was to determine how time pressure and emotion influenced people's information behavior when engaging in high stakes decision-making within the home buying domain. Employing an exploratory approach, 33 semi-structured interviews involving a timeline strategy, as well as 8 observations, were conducted with participants from the Seattle, Washington metropolitan area. Findings revealed that information use induced emotion, created a sense of time pressure and generated an interaction of the two factors, whereas non-information use behaviors such as information needs and information seeking were propelled by emotion and time pressure. The study also identified the emergent information use by proxy phenomenon wherein emotion prompted people to enlist trusted surrogates to use information for making decisions on their behalf. Further, findings show that emotion and time pressure have the ability to alter one's routine information behavior to that of a more impulsive or arbitrary approach

Standardizing disease-specific quality of life measures across multiple chronic conditions: development and initial evaluation of the QOL Disease Impact Scale (QDIS(R))

BACKGROUND: To document the development and evaluation of the Quality of life Disease Impact Scale (QDIS(R)), a measure that standardizes item content and scoring across chronic conditions and provides a summary, norm-based QOL impact score for each disease. METHODS: A bank of 49 disease impact items was constructed from previously-used descriptions of health impact to represent ten frequently-measured quality of life (QOL) content areas and operational definitions successfully utilized in generic QOL surveys. In contrast to health in general, all items were administered with attribution to a specific disease (osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, angina, myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease (CKD), diabetes, asthma, or COPD). Responses from 5418 adults were analyzed as five disease groups: arthritis, cardiovascular, CKD, diabetes, and respiratory. Unidimensionality, item parameter and scale-level invariance, reliability, validity and responsiveness to change during 9-month follow-up were evaluated by disease group and for all groups combined using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), item response theory (IRT) and analysis of variance methods. QDIS was normed in an independent chronically ill US population sample (N = 4120). RESULTS: MGCFA confirmed a 1-factor model, justifying a summary score estimated using equal parameters for each item across disease groups. In support of standardized IRT-based scoring, correlations were very high between disease-specific and standardized IRT item slopes (r = 0.88-0.96), thresholds (r = 0.93-0.99) and person-level scores (r \u3e /= 0.99). Internal consistency, test-retest and person-level IRT reliability were consistently satisfactory across groups. In support of interpreting QDIS as a disease-specific measure, in comparison with generic measures, QDIS consistently discriminated markedly better across disease severity levels, correlated higher with other disease-specific measures in cross-sectional tests, and was more responsive in comparisons of groups with better, same or worse evaluations of disease-specific outcomes at the 9-month follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Standardization of content and scoring across diseases was shown to be justified psychometrically and enabled the first summary measure of disease-specific QOL impact normed in the chronically ill population. This disease-specific approach substantially improves discriminant validity and responsiveness over generic measures and provides a basis for better understanding the relative QOL impact of multiple chronic conditions in research and clinical practice

Health Information Brokers in the General Population: An Analysis of the Health Information National Trends Survey 2013-2014

BACKGROUND: Health information exchanged between friends or family members can influence decision making, both for routine health questions and for serious health issues. A health information broker is a person to whom friends and family turn for advice or information on health-related topics. Characteristics and online behaviors of health information brokers have not previously been studied in a national population. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine sociodemographic characteristics, health information seeking behaviors, and other online behaviors among health information brokers. METHODS: Data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (2013-2014; n=3142) were used to compare brokers with nonbrokers. Modified Poisson regression was used to examine the relationship between broker status and sociodemographics and online information seeking. RESULTS: Over half (54.8%) of the respondents were consulted by family or friends for advice or information on health topics (ie, they acted as health information brokers). Brokers represented 54.1% of respondents earning \u3c $20,000 yearly and 56.5% of respondents born outside the United States. Women were more likely to be brokers (PR 1.34, 95% CI 1.23-1.47) as were those with education past high school (PR 1.42, CI 1.22-1.65). People aged \u3e /=75 were less likely to be brokers as compared to respondents aged 35-49 (PR 0.81, CI 0.67-0.99). Brokers used the Internet more frequently for a variety of online behaviors such as seeking health information, creating and sharing online content, and downloading health information onto a mobile device; and also reported greater confidence in obtaining health information online. CONCLUSIONS: More than 50% of adults who responded to this national survey, including those with low income and those born abroad, were providing health information or advice to friends and family. These individuals may prove to be effective targets for initiatives supporting patient engagement and disease management, and may also be well-positioned within their respective social networks to propagate health messages

Information behaviors in disadvantaged and dependent circumstances and the role of information intermediaries

This article provides the first empirical study focused exclusively on the information intermediary role in disadvantaged (socioeconomic) and dependent (support) circumstances. We report findings from interviews and focus groups with 49 UK state and voluntary sector professionals providing support to young

IT professionals' use a microblogs : a study of their information behaviours and information experience on Twitter

This thesis is a study of IT professional’s use of the microblog Twitter. The study shows that, Twitter is more useful for IT experts to connect, communicate and sharing information. Furthermore, the results gave the researcher an overview on the information behaviour and information experience on Twitter, where co-experience occurs by choice rather than by chance. Twitter is not only used for information-seeking and information-sharing, but it is also used as an information ground where the users meet and socialise with others

A Dual-Perspective Approach to Understanding Collegial Information Mediation in the Workplace

This dissertation is motivated by two problems. First, despite the advances of information systems, human mediation of information cannot satisfactorily be supplanted by systems. While existing research emphasizes the importance of collegial information mediation for organizational success, it has focused exclusively on the seeker’s perspectives, producing a gap in our knowledge of the giver’s. Second, companies have been increasing their investment in implementing social software, but without understanding the complexity of the processes of information mediation. To address these issues, this study takes a dual-perspective approach to examine how employees enter into and perform information mediation, how they assess interpersonal trustworthiness, information credibility, and value-in-experience, and what challenges and benefits they encounter while engaging in the process.A mixed methods study was conducted at the Research & Development department of a Fortune 500 manufacturing company in the Midwest. To capture naturalistic experiences of information mediation, and to collect in-depth narratives of those experiences, the study was carried out in two phases. In phase one, a two-week long online diary study was conducted with 75 employees. In phase two, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 45 employees. At the beginning of the interviews, the bull’s eye method was used to collect social network data.The findings have important implications for information behavior research, design of workplace social software, and organizational practice. First, it was found that collegial information mediation can be characterized as a value-addition process, which involves multiple interventions, using multiple communication media. Second, a typology of tasks that led employees to information mediation was identified. Task type was found to be a strong predictor of their decision of whom to consult for information and their perception of information credibility and value-in-experience. Third, this study found that when interchangeably playing the roles of the seeker and giver, strategies individuals used when seeking information shaped their strategies used when providing information, and conversely. Lastly, this study demonstrated that the challenges of information mediation arose in the areas of communication, comprehension, attitude of acceptance, and time. These challenges provided a framework for developing design guidelines that can empower both the seeker and giver.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102380/1/jiyeon_1.pd

Interaction with information in work and everyday life contexts: a qualitative study of the information behaviour of Saudi female academics

This study aims to investigate Saudi female academics’ information behaviour (IB) within their work and everyday life contexts. A qualitative research approach was adopted to investigate the range of information behaviour that the research participants engaged in. The data for this study were collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews and diaries. Participants’ accounts were then subject to a rigorous thematic data analysis process. The research findings indicated that female academics who participated in this study engaged in three main categories of information behaviour: information acquisition, information avoidance, and information sharing. The motivations and the strategies associated with each category have been depicted in a taxonomy of information behaviour. In addition, a detailed analysis of participants’ IB as an action-oriented process has been presented visually, leading to the development of a model that depicts IB as a contextual process. [Continues.

Beyond problem identification: valuing methods in a ‘system usability practice’

Historically, usability evaluation methods (UEMs) have been evaluated on their capability for problem identification. However, the relevance of this approach has been questioned for applied usability work. To investigate alternative explanations of what is important for method use a grounded theory of usability practitioners was developed (9 interviews from the website domain and 13 in the safety-critical domain). The analysis proceeded in bottom-up and top-down stages. The bottom-up stages produced insight from the data in an exploratory and inductive manner. This highlighted the importance of contextual factors and the need for system descriptions: UEM adoption and adaptation cannot be fully understood devoid of context. The top-down stages used Distributed Cognition and Resilience Engineering conceptual frameworks as leverage for exploring the data in a deductive manner. These were chosen for their functional descriptions of systems. To illustrate the importance of context we describe three models: 1) where previous research has highlighted the downstream utility of UEMs we expand the metaphor to consider the landscape through which the stream flows, where the landscape represents the project’s context; 2) where information propagation and transformation in a project is influenced by social, information flow, artefact, physical and evolutionary factors; and 3) where the functional couplings between parts of the system of usability practice can be monitored and managed to positively resonate with each other, thereby improving the performance of the system overall. The concept of ‘Positive Resonance’ is introduced to describe how practitioners adapt to the context to maximise their impact under constrained resources. The functional couplings are described in a functional resonance model of HCI practice. This model is validated by interviewees and other practitioners outside of the study. This research shows that problem identification is limited for valuing UEMs. Instead, functional couplings of UEMs should be considered to improve system performance, which influence UEM adoption and adaptation in practice

The Canadian Distinctiveness into the XXIst Century - La distinction canadienne au tournant du XXIe siècle

In this collection of essays some of Canada's foremost writers and thinkers, including John Ralston Saul and Margaret Atwood, call for equilibrium among economics, culture, and technological change. While promoting the dynamism and change possible in Canadian society, they also call for a re-examination of Canada's past in order to chart its future