Implicit information need as explicit problems, help, and behavioral signals
Introduction
Information need is one of the most extensively studied constructs of information seeking behavior (Case, 2012). Existing studies have explored the concept of information need from different perspectives (e.g., Belkin, 1980, Belkin, Oddy, Brooks, 1982a, Belkin, Oddy, Brooks, 1982b, Cole, 2011, Dervin, Nilan, 1986, Kuhlthau, 1991a, Savolainen, 2012, Taylor, 1962, Taylor, 1968, Wilson, 1981), various aspects related to it (e.g., Afzal, 2017, Al-Fedaghi, 2008, Hoenkamp, 2015, Julien, Duggan, 2000, Ruthven, 2019a), information need of individuals or a particular population (e.g., Dutta, 2009, Ikoja-Odongo, Ocholla, 2003), and different theoretical information seeking models related to need such as the reference interview model by Taylor (1968), the ASK model of Belkin, Oddy, Brooks, 1982a, Belkin, Oddy, Brooks, 1982b, sense-making approach of Dervin and Nilan (1986) and Dervin (1992), Bates’ berry-picking model (2002) and so on. However, the very elusive and sometimes verbally inexpressible nature of information need makes it harder to grasp and define (Cole, 2011, Wilson, 1981). Often, what is required to fulfill an information need is not clear to the researchers as well as the individual seeker (Cole, 2011).
Thus, based on existing theoretical models of information behavior, the study we report here has adopted a holistic approach to understand and explore the concept of information need from a fresh methodological perspective. Towards this objective, we examined users’ perceived barriers and desired help at different stages of information search by analyzing various implicit and explicit user search behaviors. This, in turn, allowed us to focus on representing a user’s unexpressed information need in terms of those explicit behavioral signals. We collected explicit feedback from information seekers about their perceived barriers or problems and the help that they sought at that given moment, with an assumption that their information need is strongly connected to those two aspects of information seeking (Bates, 1989, Cole, 2011, Dervin, 1983b, Dervin, Nilan, 1986, Kari, 1998). With that in mind, we planned to investigate the following research questions (RQs) that link the study of behavioral data/signals and problems and help.
- 1.
To what extent can the problems or barriers perceived by an individual in different stages of information search be predicted from different search behaviors?
- 2.
To what extent can the best help for an individual be predicted from the search behaviors and the perceived barriers/problems at a given moment in the information search process?
To address these research questions, the work reported here explores various characteristics of tasks, information seekers’ implicit behaviors, and explicit feedback in the course of online information search episodes including the problem(s) they face and suggestion for help(s) to address solutions to the potential difficulties in finding information. We focused on the information searching context which is the micro-level of seeking behavior where users interact with IR systems to achieve their goals.
Information need that arises within a person’s mind is the main initiator of information seeking behaviors (Case, 2012). This information need can be innate or external based on the person’s situation (e.g., cognitive, affective, or social), and that situation is the starting point of the information seeking process (Dervin & Nilan, 1986). Therefore, one may argue that an information need cannot be measured or concretely observed. In other words, it cannot be quantified because it is a behavioral and cognitive state of a person, and there is no empirical way to determine if what one is experiencing is a need to know something. However, the current study argues that information need is a cognitive state that is expressly felt and immediately recognizable, and therefore can be observed and measured by observing other expressible physical and cognitive activities such as the problems they face and helps they need to make sense of the problem while seeking information. Thus, one of the key contributions of this work is a new methodology to understand and infer information need by examining the related aspects, such as “problems” and “helps”. This work is an experimental study about a new approach, and this article reports the findings, strengths and weaknesses identified in this approach. Use of such methodological approaches based on problem-help attributes has not been previously explored for investigating information need and thus should provide value to conceptualize and operationalize the construct of information need, especially in the information search context. Furthermore, there has been a move in interactive information retrieval research to examine how task and user context affect their commonly observable seeking behaviors and strategies (e.g., Jiang, He, Allan, 2014, Liu, Cole, Liu, Bierig, Gwizdka, Belkin, Zhang, Zhang, 2010), however, while the perceived problems and helps are a product of these contexts and strategies, the nature of these relationships has mostly been unexplored. Thus, these aspects distinguish our current study from earlier studies which applied various methodological and theoretical approaches to explore the concept of information need. In addition, our approach is also interpretive and focuses on situated sense-making processes during information search episodes to extract a way of identifying information need behind them.
Taking this further, the work reported here shows how to explicate potential current and future problems and preferred help within information search episodes using behavioral data. This knowledge can then be used to provide more personalized recommendations to an information seeker, as well as to preempt potential problems by offering help before the searcher even realizes the need for such help. The rest of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the research on information need and concepts of problem, help, and other constructs that have been used in our study, such as tasks and behavioral measures to establish the background and introduces a conceptual framework for the current study. Section 3 discusses how we incorporated these constructs into the study design. Sections 4 and 5 describe the methodology, data analysis and the results followed by the discussion of the results and concluding remarks in the subsequent sections.
Section snippets
Background and theoretical frameworks
We begin with a discussion of information need in the online information search context. An information need is an evolving state of mind at a given moment in a sequence of time-space moments in a person’s life within which the person engages in seeking information through interconnected cognitive and behavioral actions. Although it is an abstract state of mind, it is felt and recognizable, and therefore can be observed and measured by observing other expressible physical and cognitive
Implementation of the frameworks in the experimental design
Based on the socio-cognitive construct of information need established by above-mentioned studies, we envision a user’s information need as the perceived inadequacies or a gap in the user’s conceptual state of knowledge, which changes continuously as the user progresses through the information seeking process. When users face a problematic situation and do not have adequate knowledge to solve it, they may have an ill-defined information need which is not clear enough for articulation. They need
Methodology
To address the research gaps and questions discussed above, we designed a controlled laboratory-based user study in a research university environment using a mixed method approach, where participants were asked to perform three search tasks. Participants were additionally asked to report problems faced at various steps in the search process, as well as what would help them at that moment in the process. The main components of the study procedure are detailed in the following subsections.
Data analysis and results
Data collected through the user study was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential methods. The unit of analysis was the problem and help situation at a given query segment when a participant was about to formulate a query. Operationally, the problem-help situation began when a user who was engaged in a information-searching task encountered a problem that prevented him or her from continuing the search task and marked the problem(s) and desired help(s) in the questionnaire, formulated a
Discussion and implications
This study explores the connection between users’ implicit and explicit searching behaviors, the constraints and barriers people perceived while looking for information online, and preferred help to mitigate those barriers in different stages of an information search episode. From the data analysis, some interesting observations emerge. Some of the observations are evident in existing studies and are subject to common sense. However, some subtle observations additionally emerged from the
Conclusions
Information need is a widely researched concept within information science. However, despite its importance, there is still a lack of understanding of what information need is and what its dimensions are. Therefore, there is a need to go beyond the approaches used thus far, especially to conceptualize as well as operationalize the construct of information need. The purpose of this study is to propose a new methodology to examine the concept of information need in different stages of the
Acknowledgments
The study reported here was funded by the NSF grant #IIS-1717488. Thus, we would like to acknowledge the NSF for their support, our study participants for their participation, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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