A phenomenographic approach to the effect of emotions on the information behaviour of doctoral students: A narrative inquiry

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. This article is to examine how emotions affect the doctoral student’s journey by analyzing diverse aspects of the information behaviour that emerged from their narratives through a phenomenographic perspective. Narratives are a rational way of communication that focuses on how people perceive different phenomena regarding themselves, their inner thoughts, their states of mind, and how it affects their lifeworld’s. This phenomenographic study employs interview data from 36 doctoral students. The data collected from the narratives were studied drawing from the variation theory and iterative data analysis resulted in categories of doctoral student experiences and their emotional journey. The holistic phase of the thematic analysis revealed a relatively balanced interplay of positive and negative emotions. The rich data obtained in the phenomenographic approach exposed significant links between participants’ heightened emotions in five common themes during looking for information, their interactions with key individuals (supervisors and peer) and situations in their doctoral lives. Whilst this paper focuses on the approach taken to explore the narratives, recommendations are made based on the findings and to further explore the information-seeking behaviour patterns of doctoral students

Information science and cognitive psychology: a theoretical approach

Information, as a human and social phenomenon, is the object of study of an emergent scientific field named Information Science (IS), which we put forward as unitary and transdisciplinary and open to a rich interdisciplinarity with other fields of knowledge. In face of the new reality, baptized the Information Society', and the emergence of a new paradigm, that we name "post-custodial, scientific and informational", as opposed to the previous one, "historicist, custodial and technicist", it is urgent to consolidate the theoretical and methodological foundations of IS in order to develop research, both pure and applied, and to contribute to a definition of its boundaries as a scientific area, in the scope of Social Sciences. Starting from an operative definition of Information, this paper aims to discuss the cognitive and emotional dimension of the info-communicational phenomenon and, for that, it is crucial to start a profound and hard dialogue with Cognitive Sciences. The label of 'cognitivist' given, in IS literature, to some authors like Bertram Brookes, because of the emphasis he put on the passage from a state of knowledge to a new state through an addition of knowledge coming from an increase of information, sounds quite equivocal, because knowledge and cognition are not synonymous and cognitive and emotional activity is not reducible to formalities. It is necessary to compare concepts and to understand the neuropsychological roots of the production, the organization and the info-communicational behaviour, so the contribution of Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences, namely Cognitive Psychology, is indispensable

A personalised interface for web directories based on cognitive styles

Implementing personalisation in Web Directories depends not only on developing appropriate architectures and equipping Web Directories with adaptation techniques, but also on incorporating human factors considerations at an early design stage. Among a range of human factors this paper explores cognitive styles and their influence on users’ preferences. Preferences with respect to the organisation and presentation of the content, and the navigation paths are identified through a small-scale study. The findings are analysed and used to implement a prototype Web Directory Browser, gearing interface features to cognitive style-related preferences