Adolescent information behaviour in everyday life decision making

Purpose. Within the field of information science, adolescent information behaviour as a part of the general decision making process is a relatively under-examined area. The way adolescents interact with information when making decisions influences decision outcomes and consequently affects their lives. Therefore, the study of information behaviour in the decision making process is an important area for research development. The goal of this paper is to take a step to advance research in this direction by reviewing what has been learnt and offering directions for future work. Methodology. The existing publications reporting the research on adolescent information behaviour related to making everyday life decisions within the information science field were investigated using content analysis methodology. Twenty articles were selected and analysed in the following aspects: information behaviour, including information seeking, passive information acquisition and information avoidance, information sources, barriers to information seeking, information use and affective experiences. Findings. It was found that the research on the topic of decision making within the information science field is scarce. Few studies focus specifically on adolescent information behaviour for making everyday life decisions and they consider only one specific decision situation. The existing work reveals that adolescents employ a wide range of information behaviour when making decisions in everyday life, both active and passive: information seeking, passive information acquisition which encompasses passive search and passive attention, community approach, deferring information seeking and information avoidance. They use a variety of information sources, and source selection depends on internal and external factors. They face barriers which impede information seeking and use information to increase knowledge on decision situations and therefore help the decision making process. Adolescent information behaviour in this context proved to be accompanied with affective experiences. Limitations. Some limitations of the study refer to the coverage of the literature from the information science field, to the selection of the relevant literature and to summarizing of the findings given the limitations of the form, i.e. a single chapter. Originality. This study tackles one of the barely touched areas in information science and youth information behaviour research and raises some important questions which need to be addressed

Toward a Better Understanding of Help Seeking Behavior: An Evaluation of Help Mechanisms in Two IR systems

Help-seeking can be viewed as a multi-dimensional information behavior which often overlaps with both information seeking and searching. Within IR, though, there has been little research devoted to understanding how people learn to use help functionalities effectively. Research reported in this paper addresses this gap. After searching in two IR systems, fifty participants completed a self-administered questionnaire which described the ways they learned to use the help mechanisms; difficulties associated with this learning process; their general evaluation of the help mechanisms, with specification of features that they liked and disliked; specific aspects of the help mechanism that assisted participants in the search process; and their evaluation of the interaction between the searcher and the help mechanisms. The results show that people prefer specific help, visual help, and help with demos instead of general help, text help, and help with description. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are further discussed

2 Cases, Scripts, and Information-Seeking Strategies

A revised version of this paper is published in

Cases, Scripts, and Information-Seeking Strategies: On the Design of Interactive Information Retrieval Systems

The support of effective interaction of the user with the other components of the system is a central problem for information retrieval. In this paper, we present a theory of such interactions taking place within a space of information-seeking strategies, and discuss how such a concept can be used to design for effective interaction. In particular, we propose a model of information retrieval system design based on the ideas of: a multi-dimensional space of information-seeking strategies; dialogue structures for information seeking; cases of specific information-seeking dialogues; and, scripts as distinguished prototypical cases. We demonstrate the use of this model by discussing in some detail the MERIT system, a prototype information retrieval system which incorporates these design principles

New tools and old habits: The interactive searching behavior of expert online searchers using INQUERY

We present data that describe the interactive searching behavior of ten searchers using the INQUERY retrieval engine in the context of the TREC-3 routing task. We discuss how these searchers with a strong background in the use of traditional online retrieval mechanisms adapted, after very limited training, to the use of a best-match, ranked-output, full-text retrieval mechanism

The cortical activity of graded relevance

Relevance is an essential concept in Information Retrieval (IR). Recent studies using brain imaging have significantly contributed towards the understanding of this concept, but only as a binary notion, i.e. a document being judged as relevant or non-relevant. While such a binary division is prevalent in IR, seminal theories have proposed relevance as a graded variable; i.e. having different degrees. In this paper, we aim to investigate the brain activity associated with relevance when it is treated as a graded concept. Twenty-five participants provided graded relevance judgements in the context of a Question Answering (Q/A) Task, during assessment with an electroencephalogram (EEG). Our findings show that significant differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) were observed in response to information segments processed in the context of high-relevance, low-relevance and no-relevance, supporting the concept of graded relevance. We speculate that differences in attentional engagement, semantic mismatch (between the question and answer) and memory processing underpin the electrophysiological responses to the graded relevance judgements. We believe our conclusions constitute an important step in unravelling the nature of graded relevance and knowledge of the electrophysiological modulation to each grade of relevance will help to improve the design and evaluation of IR systems

Science (COLIS4) (pp. 1-15). Greenwood Village, CO: Libraries Unlimited. 2002. A Classification of Interactions with Information

A faceted classification of interactions with information is proposed, based on an empirical study of knowledge workers in their ordinary work environments. The purpose of the classification is to inform the design of information retrieval systems which can support, within a single framework, the whole variety of interactions with information that people engage in during the course of information seeking. The classification scheme has five major facets, by combination of which it is claimed that all those interactions of people with information which are related to information seeking, can be described. 1