INST352 Final

Criteria that define scholarly sources

1. Goes through peer review process 

2. Summarizes research findings 

3. Written by scholars for scholar

4. Includes citations

5. Respond directly to current events (?)

Criteria that define popular sources

1. Published quickly 

2. Responds directly to current events  

3. Can be read quickly 

4. Summarizes research findings (?)

5. Includes citations

Title

Includes: concise description of what an article is about

Authors

Includes: A list of all of the authors of an article, along with each authors credentials

Abstract

• The overall topic 

• The research problem and research questions investigated

• The methods used to conduct the study

• A brief summary of the authors findings

• A description of the implications of these findings

Introduction

• An introduction to the overall topic 

• Summarizes whats already been done on the topic & what gaps remain 

• Identifies specific research problem & research questions they investigated 

• Explains why this research problem/question is important to address

• Lays out goals & objectives for their research

Literature Review

• A synthesized review of what has already been done in this research area 

• Ends with identification of a specific gap they intend to address with their research

Methods

• A description of overarching research design 

• Describes in detail the specific methods used to recruit participants for their study, to collect data from them, and to analyze this data 

• A rationale for using these particular methods

• Good practice to include info about how the researcher protected study participants (e.g. informed consent, privacy)

Findings/Results

• Subsection where authors describe their participants (how many, relevant demographic characteristics, etc…) 

• Moves on to actual findings - identifying answers to their research questions and/or central themes that emerged in their data 

• Various forms of evidence (e.g. statistics, verbatim quotes) to support their findings.

Conclusion

• Author relating their findings back to initial goals and specific research questions

• Description of the conclusions they drew based on their findings and the particular contributions their work has made 

• Discussion of the potential significance of their findings

• Propose ideas for future research in the area

Reference List

• An alphabetical list of the literature cited within the paper

• Entries are usually formatted according to a particular citation style

Appendices

• Full text of the survey administered to participants

• A list of questions posed to interviewees (sometimes called “interview protocol”) 

• Guide that researchers developed to gives structure to a field observation they conducted (often called “observation guide”)

• Script that authors developed as they conducted an experiment with their study participants

Validity

• The extent to which our measuring procedures accurately measure what we intend to measure 

Reliability

• Replicability; measures repeated under the same conditions yield highly similar measurements

Triangulation

• Collection of multiple types of data and/or use of multiple data collection/analysis techniques within one particular study 

  • Great way to strengthen study design

Probing

• Asking an interviewee to elaborate on their response to a question 

Participatory Design

Researcher/designers actively involve the technology’s intended end-users in the design, from initial idea generation to prototyping and production

Convenience sampling

•  Finding participants based on who is the most available to the interviewer and who is willing to participate

Snowball sampling

• Past participants in an experiment recruit future participants, and are useful for finding hard-to-reach participants or populations 

Respect for persons

• Participants recognized as autonomous individuals. 

Beneficence

• Do no harm. 

• Maximize possible benefits, minimize possible harms 

Justice

Distributions of benefits and burdens of research

Informed consent

• Information: provided all that is relevant in an understandable and researchable way 

• Comprehension: participants should be able to understand the information provided 

• Voluntariness: participants should not be under any pressure to participate in research (incl. coercion, excessive reward, influence, threatening to withdraw health services, etc.)

Assessment of risks & benefits

• Benefits should outweigh risks

• Must be communicated to participants in informed consent process 

Selection of subjects

• Individual Justice:  participants chosen fairly and without bias, all research in participants favor 

• Social justice: burden and benefits equally shared 

User Centered Design

•  Design that keeps the user and their needs at the center of the process throughout every stage

How do UX, accessibility, and usability affect each other?

• An information technology is not usable if it is not accessible. Accessibility and usability influence the user’s experience (UX) as they attempt to interact with the technology

To be accessible, technologies must be…

• “Usable in an equal manner by all users without relying on specific senses or abilities… [and] must be compatible with the assistive technologies that users may rely on”

Why does having accessibility on the internet matter?

• Inaccessibility exacerbates existing inequities with regard to education, employment, and civic engagement opportunities

Digital Divide

• The gap between those who have access to a computer and the Internet and those who do not

Digital Literacy

• Having the cognitive and technical skills necessary to use the internet to fulfill one’s information needs 

Digital Inclusion

• People can both access and use information and communication technologies (ICTs) 

Dervin’s Sense-Making Model/Theory

• Central Assumption: discontinuity and how it affects our lives and choices 

• 3 Concepts:

  1. Situation: the events in a person's life that create the context for a lack of sense 

  2. gaps

     • Verbings: sense-making, sense-unmaking ( things that help the people make sense and cross the gap) 

  3. outcomes : what a person hopes to have after a person creates they’ve created a new sense of their situation 

• 2 Behaviors:

  1. gap-defining : this occurs when a person thinks they cant move forward because they don't make sense of their situation

  2. Gap bridging: when a person figures how to make sense of things

Bates’ Berrypicking Model

• Move from source to source (bushes or “patches”), taking pieces of information (berries) until another source is determined to be more useful

Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process Model

• Change in thoughts & actions

  1. Thoughts: ambiguous -> specificity

  2. Actions: seeking relevant information -> seeking pertinent information

Pettigrew’s Information Ground

•  “An environment temporarily created by the behavior of people who have come together to perform a given task, but from which emerges a social atmosphere that fosters the spontaneous and serendipitous sharing of information” 

Zipf’s Law

• Definition: The idea that people will generally try to minimize effort where they can by minimizing the total amount of effort they put in to a task 

• Consequences: Often results in sacrificing credibility for accessibility

1900’s – World War II

• Library Focus 

• Pivot: WWII

1990’s – Present

Expanded focus includes the whole environment

Disinformation

• intentionally misstating the facts

Misinformation

getting the facts wrong

Satisficing

finding information that is just good enough

Optimizing

exhaustive searches

Relevant

• Information that has to do with your topic

Pertinent

Information that fits with specific information need

Recall

• What proportion of relevant items in the database were successfully retrieved

  • Maximizes? Comprehensive 

  • Poor recall = missed relevant information

Precision

• What proportion of the items retrieved are actually relevant 

  • Maximizes? Relevance 

  • Poor precision = information overload 

Information Behavior Model & Theory

• Model: Describe and/or predict how people advance through various stages as they interact with information in order to perform some type of task or activity

• Theory: Explain why people do what they do (or not do) with regard to information

• Differences: Models are often more specific and concrete, tend to precede or illustrate stories 

Information

Anything that someone might perceive to be informative at some time

Information Behavior

“The totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use” (Wilson , 1999)

• It encompasses

  • peoples interactions (and lack of interactions) with information

• equations: behavior + verb = information behavior

Information Avoidance

Intentionally avoiding or delaying information that is freely accessible

• Ranges: passive → active

Consequences

• Positive

  • Avoiding fear or anxiety

  • Avoiding uncertainty

  • Maintaining hope

• Negative

  • Unable to participate in making informed decisions

  • Offered less info by doctors

  • Treated paternalistically

  • Having/keeping limited information literacy

Information Access

The physical and/or cognitive freedom or ability to acquire information

• perceived accessibility is just as (and perhaps more) important than actual accessibility

• A lack of actual (or perceived) information can be functionally equivalent to a lack of access

Common findings

• People are often willing to sacrifice information quality or credibility for convenience

Incognizance

Having an information need, but not being aware of it

Consequences

• Unlikely to actively seek info pertaining to this need or be able to recognize the relevance of any information they do happen to come across

Serendipity

Searching for information on one topic and happening to come across information on another topic that is of interest to you

Supercounters

• People are more “serendipity-prone”

Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS)

Information seeking outside of school or work

Learning Commons Model

• Shift to user- & learner-centered and user-friendly model since 1980s

Role of a Librarian

• Gatekeepers of information → “connectors and instructors on how to use advanced technology to accumulate knowledge” (Hadler, 2016)

Library Anxiety

“The feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students, it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there” (Mellon, 1986)

Librarians Axiom

Consistent finding that public library use increases during economic downturns

Mental Model

• A person’s continuously evolving cognitive representation of a system that incorporates their beliefs about how the system works

  • A person’s mental model of a particular system guides his/her use of the system and is iteratively (re)informed by his/her interactions with the system across time

  • Users’ mental models are often messy and incomplete (Norman, 1983)

How students believe Google works

• Students’ drawings exhibited a limited understanding of how Google actually works

• People’s mental models of a system have been found to correlate with their (in)ability to make effective use of it

Recommendations and Limitations (Kodama et al.)

Recommendations

• Educators need to teach students how search engines work

• SE developers & interface designers need to make the actual search processes more transparent & trustworthy to users

Limitations

• Instructions may have influenced students’ drawings and/or their verbal explanations of their drawings

• Students’ verbal explanations may have been influenced by students who went before them

• Participants may have had inadequate manual dexterity skills and/or verbal/written capabilities to accurately draw and describe their mental models of Google

• Didn’t ask about any prior computing/digital literacy classes the students may have taken

• Sample was relatively small & findings likely don’t generalize beyond this particular group of students

Legal Information Literacy

• The fact that laypeople are not familiar with legal terminology is only part of the problem

• Legal terminology difficult to understand – when people don’t understand what they are reading, they are likely to stop reading

• Legal system is not user-friendly

  • Number of self-represented litigants has been steadily increasing over the past ~20 years, particularly in certain types of cases

Barriers to legal information access

• Not familiar with legal terminology

• legal terminology is difficult to understand

• Legal system is not user friendly

Main ways to combat barriers experienced by lay people

• Two recent sets of initiatives have been instrumental in helping to diminish the barriers to legal information access experienced by laypeople:

  • Use of plain language in legal materials

  • Development of self-help services

Consumer health information behavior (CHIB)

Encompasses consumers’ health-related information needs, as well as the activities in which they engage (or do not engage) in order to look for, manage, share, and make use of this information

Health information behavior equation

Health information + verb (or not) = Health information behavior

Health information preferences & challenges

Preferences:

• Important role of information in enabling a person to stay healthy or cope with an illness

• 3 types of seeking practices

  • Active (reduces uncertainty)

  • Passive 

  • Avoidant (maintains or increases uncertainty)

Challenges:

• Incognizance

  • Having some particular information need, but being unaware that one has this need; lacks even a visceral sense that something is missing

  • Some may never develop this awareness or they may too late

  • May not recognize that symptoms  mean anything = unlikely to seek info, unlikely to recognize relevance of info

• Info Need → Info Seeking

  • Once need is recognized, must be able to identify & articulate that need to begin searching

  • Examples of potential barriers:

    • Insufficient health literacy

    • Lack of awareness, access, or knowledge of how to use / find trustworthy health information

    • Inability understand personal relevance, credibility, usefulness of info they may find

• Info Seeking → Info Use

  • Once info is gathered, additional barriers may prevent putting that info to use

  • Must be able to understand, adapt, take action based on it

  • Health info ≠ “one size fits all”

  • Information use (or non-use) influences health trajectory, quality of life, potential / actual health outcomes

Health Justice

• Health justice underscores the moral right of every individual to an equitable and sufficient capability to be healthy

• Cannot achieve health justice without a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, particularly information

• The WHO (2017) specifically mentions information as one of the underlying determinants of health

• Does not exist but is a distant goal