Revisiting user studies and information needs

T.D. Wilson
University of Sheffield, and Leeds University Business School, UK and Swedish School of Library and Information Science, Gothenburg University and Hfögskolan i Borås, Sweden

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to respond to Bawden’s review of Wilson’s 1981 paper, "On user studies and information needs".
Design/methodology/approach – The paper reflects on the context of the original paper, and on subsequent developments.
Findings – The paper comments on a variety of issues relating to information science as a discipline, and its research programme and methods, with specific emphasis on the understanding of human information behaviour.
Originality/value – The paper provides a unique perspective on the development of this aspect of the discipline.

[This article is a response to "Users, users studies and human information behaviour: a three decade perspective on Tom Wilson’s ‘On user studies and information needs’", by David Bawden, published in Journal of Documentation, Vol. 62 No. 6. The article is part of a series celebrating 60 years of the best in information research in Journal of Documentation.]

David Bawden has provided what seems to me, at least, an excellent, insightful review of the impact of my 1981 Journal of Documentation paper, and I was, initially, at somewhat of a loss to know how to respond – it seems rather narcissistic to reply to the commentary! To a degree, the paper is history, although, as David notes, it appears still to be relevant and some of the concerns it expressed still await thorough examination. However, it cannot be properly understood without some awareness of its prehistory. David has provided a general analysis of the state of what is now called "human information behaviour research" at the time of its publication, but a more specific contextual setting may be useful. When the paper was published, the major research project, which I had been directing, the INISS Project (Wilson and Streatfield, 1980), had just come to an end, after five years of work on communication and information flows in local authority social services departments. It was the experience of this project that drove many of the ideas, although some had been in my mind, and used in teaching, for a decade before. (In fact, I had tried to get funds for a similar project in about 1966 or 1968, but had been turned down.)

That project was seminal for reasons that I think are relevant today and which, perhaps, explain why information behaviour research today is more fragmentary than it ought to be. To begin with, the project lasted five years, with two funding agencies (the British Library R&D Department and the then Department of Health and Social Security) supporting it sequentially, with a group of co-workers, most of whom lasted the course. It is almost inconceivable, today, that one would ever be able to amass the research funds for such a project and it is not irrelevant to note that one of the agencies (BLRDD) no longer exists (typically, of course, for government departments, the DHSS has gone through several transformations since then). Revisiting users studies

Second, the project was conceived of as an "action research" project and the final 681 stage involved the implementation of pilot projects in a number of departments, all of which had been involved in the research programme. Thus, they were true participants in the research from the relevant field of practice, and through the action research model, the research findings could actually be used to bring about a degree of change in those organizations. We know that some of the innovations were taken into the normal day to day activities of the departments concerned and persisted for some years after the end of the project – indeed, one or two may persist to the present, their origins forgotten! The involvement with the social services field continued for almost ten years after the end of the project through the workshops that David Streatfield and I ran for the National Institute for Social Work (now also defunct).

Third, the methods employed in the research included the use of "structured" observation (I think for the first time in a major information science project). It was this method that revealed, to all of the team members, the value of direct engagement with the practitioners, and it led to my championing of qualitative methods as a necessary part of the research process. I do not believe that qualitative methods should be the sole means of investigating information phenomena, and I regret the extent to which researchers today carry out one qualitative study after another without attempting to put the ideas that emerge to the test of the Law of Large Numbers. It is rather odd that I have become so associated with the advocacy of qualitative methods that people look askance when I suggest that quantitative methods have a role to play.

This was the fertile ground out of which emerged the 1981 paper, and the project carries messages for present-day research: there is a need for research programmes lasting for several years, rather than numerous one-off projects; there is a need for action research to engage effectively with practitioner communities if research is to make a difference in practice; and there is a need for multiple methods of research, rather than fixation with a single category of methods.

Turning to David’s commentary on the paper, I would like to consider three issues or concerns. First, he notes that the need I identified for in-depth investigations into specific "user groups" has not yet been satisfied. It is interesting to speculate why this might be so: partly, I believe that it is the very success of human information behaviour as a research area in academia that has brought about a proliferation of small-scale, doctoral studies, that play against the development of in-depth research programmes. The number of doctoral candidates in the field who can achieve positions of tenured researchers in universities is much smaller than the total of such candidates, and those who do achieve positions often find that the exigencies of the job demand a switch in research interests to support new teaching commitments. Building doctoral research interests into a continuing research programme is the exception, rather than the rule. There has also been a tendency to focus doctoral research on easy-to-access groups, such as fellow students and school-children, and a genuine concern for social issues has also led to studies of those affected by social inequality in one way or another. Investigation of information users in the world of work is, by comparison, a poor relation – a pity, because that world offers contexts of information use that are very different, not only from schools and universities, but from each other.

Second, on the same theme, David notes that, "nor is it clear that any significant and generally accepted underlying factors have come to light" (through in-depth study). I think that there is mixed success in this regard: in relation to health information use, for example, the concepts of "monitoring" and "blunting" have proved very useful in explaining the information seeking and use behaviour of those in need of such information, and the concept of "self-efficacy" shows signs of usefulness in understanding the extent to which people will actually undertake and information search, and with what success. On the other hand, we know little about the motivations of people in seeking and using information: I suggested that the concept of "stress" could be expanded and might explain why some people engage in information seeking and others do not, but it is apparent that, in the same situation, and under the same apparent "stress", some people will seek information to help them alleviate that stress and others will not. What motivates either is currently an area barren of research.

Third, "information science" as a field or study or a discipline is now under greater threat as a coherent topic within library and information studies than it was when I identified the potential threat in 1981. David notes the continuing "scatter" of information science research across a wide range of other disciplines, and I see no end to this, simply because what used to be, from the point of view of other disciplines, a rather arcane curiosity, is now the lifeblood of society. The "information age" has brought about a "democratisation" of interest in all aspects of information production, information flows, information use and information behaviour generally. The worldwide web and its success as a dominant communications system (at least in the developed world) has brought information issues to the attention of governments, research funding agencies, the media, and just about every discipline under the sun. The other major area of information research that I mentioned in 1981, information retrieval, has now migrated to the field of computer science and is unlikely ever again to constitute a strong research area in "information science", unless, as in one or two places, the two academic areas have been merged in one of the recurrent restructurings of universities. Should this be a cause for concern? Not really. Contexts change, academic subject areas grow and decline – mining engineering used to be a strong subject in a number of universities in the UK, but now it is almost non-existent – information science cannot be an exception to this condition. What used to be called LIS departments in universities in the UK have changed dramatically over the past twenty years: some no longer exist, some have merged (or have been merged) into larger "schools", some have changed their curricula completely and no longer attempt to provide for the needs of the "traditional" library and information sector. We are not likely to see an end to this process. We would be better employed seeking to expand the concept of "information science" to include all of the related areas, such as human-computer interaction, information systems development, health information management and the like, rather than trying to defend an inexorably shrinking and somewhat artificial specialism.

A natural, concluding question is, "Where does human information behaviour research go from here?" I can foresee a number of possible trends: first, electronic information resources, structured in various ways, are becoming the dominant environment within which information seeking takes place and, consequently, the current engagement with the relationship between information seeker and the worldwide web, digital libraries and other information structures is likely to continue and, I suspect, will further strengthen existing and potential relationships between information science and information systems research. Second, the "digital divide" is unlikely to disappear quickly, whether within developed countries or between the developed and the developing world, and how the "information disadvantaged" discover what they need to know is likely to become a significant area of research. Third, the present divide between information policy and practice and information research (except in relation to information technology) may be eroded as policy makers recognize that their policies need more than the existence of appropriate technology to be successful – they also need to understand in greater depth than hitherto the relationship between information seeker and information technology: the present debacle in the implementation of new IT systems in the National Health Service in the UK is a case in point. Last, although this list is not intended to be comprehensive, I think that the present proliferation of theoretical perspectives in the field may begin to contract to a core of conceptual frameworks that prove to be useful. We have lacked a common conceptual framework that provides a common language for researchers and that would serve to pull projects together and provide the basis for cumulative research. I have recently (Wilson, 2006) suggested that "activity theory" offers such a basis and I am optimistic that its strengths and potential will be recognized by others.

Finally, in addition to a prehistory, any research paper also has a social setting and I would like to acknowledge those who helped to make possible the research upon which the 1981 paper was based and without whom there would have been no Project INISS and no paper: first, Professor Wilf Saunders recruited me to Sheffield and supported all my efforts to develop a research career and Norman Roberts acted as a subtly informal "mentor". Second, David Streatfield, my Principal Investigator (as the curious term was at the time), has been a friend and co-worker since 1975 – in fact, together we ran a group discussion session at the IATUL 2006 conference in Oporto a few weeks before this was written – and much of the argument in the 1981 paper was argued first with him. Finally, the other co-workers on the INISS project, Judith Goldie, Vivienne Lowndes-Smith, Virginia Messenger, Christine Mullings, Barbara Pendleton and Jackie Pritchard (some of whom continued in research elsewhere, some of whom actually moved on to work in social services) contributed to the project and to the continuous debates that informed our work.

Happily, I continue my research career as a result of the generosity and friendship of colleagues at Leeds University Business School and the Swedish School of Library and Information Studies (Gothenburg University and the Högskolan i Borås), but the circumstances that led to the publication of "On user studies and information needs" are unlikely to be replicated. I trust, however, that there may be other research outputs that will help to advance human information behaviour research.

About the author

T.D. Wilson is Professor Emeritus, University of Sheffield, and Visiting Professor, Leeds University Business School, and Swedish School of Library and Information Science, Gothenburg University and Högskolan i Borås. T.D. Wilson can be contacted at: t.d.wilson@shef.ac.uk

References

Wilson, T.D. (2006), "A re-examination of information seeking behaviour in the context of activity theory", Information Research, Vol. 11 No. 4, paper 260, available at: http:// InformationR.net/ir/11-4/paper260.html
Wilson, T.D. and Streatfield, D.R. (1980), You Can Observe a Lot . . . A Study of Information use in Local Authority Social Services Departments Conducted by Project INISS, Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, (occasional publication no. 12), available at: http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/

How to cite this paper

Wilson, T.D. (2011). Revisiting user studies and information needs Journal of Documentation, 62(6), 680-684