Tour Information - Battered Women

After discussing tour interests with Alex, we have decided to explore the information needs of battered women who haven't sought help from shelters. This issue is hard to research, as these women aren't always identifiable because they don't seek information. The question is, if they want help, where are they looking? What information do they need to get help? This particular article was recommended by Dr. Solomon and discusses women who receive help and then go back to the abuser.

Baker, P. L. (1997). And I went back: Battered women's negotiation of choice. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 26(1), 55-74.

Baker conducted sixteen in-depth interviews with women who left their abusive spouses and then returned to them - which is a very different audience. She discusses how the system failed these women and how their information needs were inadequately met. For various reasons, the needs of these sixteen women were not met the 'script' as Baker calls it that lawyers, social workers, and police officers use to help these women.

I think this article is very useful to studying the information needs of battered women; by studying how the system does not help women, we can figure out what to do to make the system better. Sometimes studying the unmet needs gives us more insight into the information seeker than studying how systems currently meet the needs of users.

Scrapbook - Unit 9

Reading the second-half of the 'time and timing' article brought a lot of thoughts to mind. One of the participants in the organization described the 'old' information as 'slimy' in that it did the members of the organization no good and actually slowed them down in the WPP. Rarely do we, as information professionals, think about information gathering over time. It's true - as we collect more data, we gather more knowledge and therefore our information needs on a single subject change over time. In the beginning of the information seeking process, we have a limited amount of information on a topic - otherwise, we wouldn't be searching for more information. As time progresses and we do more information seeking, we (as information seekers) gain a certain amount of knowledge about the topic we are researching. This knowledge results in some information being of no use to us as information seekers and we need a higher quality or a higher level of information. I have a feeling that the group in Solomon's article did too much information gathering in the beginning so that by the third quarter of Year 1, they were dealing with old information - information that they no longer need. This in effect, lost them a significant amount of time - they lost the time they spent gathering information in the beginning, going through the 'slimy' information, and then gathering more information! While planning is critical to planning projects, we sometimes must remember that project planning could very well cause project creep.

Solomon also mentions that organizations gather more information than they use; then turn around and ask for more. I think big corporations fall prey to 'too much information'. I had an internship at a fortune 500 a couple of summers ago and I got to participate in our bi-monthly meetings where gathering too much information and passing it off to others was all too common. I think that managers should realize that while it is important to share information with co-workers, they do not need to know everything nor do they need to be overwhelmed with information. I'm not saying that managers should hide things from employees; rather, they should only give them what they need to know. I think the employees would be more satisfied in the end and they wouldn't waste 3 hours every other week at a very long, sometimes unnecessary, meeting!

I think when it comes to information and time, the information seeker (and the information professional) needs to take level of knowledge and accumulation of knowledge over time into account. By adding the 'time' perspective to our initial information gathering, we may see early on in the Work Planning Process that this does not necessarily need to occur in the beginning! I also think that taking into account knowledge levels of the information seeker, information professionals can pass on a higher level of information, thus better satisfying the needs of the information seeker.

This issue ties into a concept I explored in Dr. Losee's Information Retrieval class. We were developing our 'dream search engines' without taking into account the mechanics of how to develop them (so as not to stunt our creativity). My ideal search engine would know what I'm doing a search for - work, school, or pleasure. Each of these three categories warrants a different type of knowledge - for work, I need detailed information or perhaps the answer to a very detailed question; for school, I need scholarly information; leisure searching warrants the need of very general knowledge. I think that adding time to this mix would also change how we search and the results we need. If we could design an information system that takes knowledge levels into account, I think that the profession would make a tremendous leap forward and the needs of the information seeker would be more efficiently met.

The second article we read (Solomon's Dynamics article) discussed the idea of the expert versus the novice information seeker. Showing out children's information needs change over time on a certain topic certainly illustrates how our knowledge levels increase as we gather more information. One point brought about in the 'Implications' section was something I hadn't considered but should have: not every information seeker wants or needs to become an expert - some people only need general information. For these people, the ideal system would cut out the details and give them 'Wikipedia' type knowledge - a general overview.

Understanding the current knowledge-level of the information seeker and where they are in the information seeking process would allow systems to better serve the user's information needs. Developing a system that understands this level of knowledge based on search terms and takes the knowledge level into account as it performs a search would effectively deal with changing information needs and knowledge-levels over time.

Scrapbook - Unit 8

10.12.06

The conclusions of Solomon's paper include worthy advice for all information professionals - people think of information as part of the Work Planning Process, and not its own entity the way we do. By thinking of information from the perspective of the user, we can design more effective systems. In this particular article, there seemed to be huge breakdowns in communication. As people try to make sense of the information they have, communication problems ensue. Thus, it is the job of information professionals to address these communication needs.

The problem with the people in the article, it seems, was that communication was a bit too formalized for one group and too unorganized for the other. Finding somewhere in the middle would be ideal. This place would include people being comfortable enough to discuss their problems openly, while still respecting the manager's viewpoint.

By looking into the alternative social views, we can see others viewpoints. If the manager in the article had seen the viewpoint of the worker and vice versa, the team could have worked together more efficiently. From this same standpoint, information professionals can use these viewpoints to design systems.

To get at these view points we must put ourselves in the place of the information seeker and think about their perspectives. By openly analyzing the information seeking/using habits of others, we can understand their vantage points and thus become more successful as information professionals.

Discussion Board Comments on Tour Topic

Last week I read an article on the information seeking habits of women with breast cancer. This week I found an article on the information seeking habits of battered women. I know I want to do my tour on a woman-centered topic, so to speak, but I feel that the battered women perspective is so unique that I should study it more in-depth. Battered women have emotional and psychological issues that prohibit them from searching for information in the same way other information seekers do. It is because of this unique perspective that I chose my article for the week, and have decided to make my tour topic on the information seeking behavior of battered women.

Harris, R. M. (1988). RQ; the Information Needs of Battered Women. American Library Association.

Harris interviewed 40 women who used the services of a battered women's shelter. The author asked questions about where help was sought before the women left their abusive spouses and whether or not it was helpful. The conclusions were that women were not helped by the police and other authority figures (for the most part). Women did find help from friends and family (when they weren't being judgmental), social workers, the clergy, and lawyers. Each of these information resources were not always helpful and sometimes gave the women negative information that made them feel guilty. The author concluded that battered women (at least the ones in the study) did not utilize library resources; however, she suggests that libraries should market (in a sense) the books they offer on relationships and abusive spouses. She also advises that libraries create outreach programs to the people battered women contact for help so that they can send the women to the library where they can access the information they need.

I liked the way the author approached the situation. By interviewing women from a battered women's shelter she found the audience she needed. I wonder about the information needs of women who did not find the women's shelter - where are they going for help (or are they seeking help at all?) and why isn't it helpful? By expanding the sample Harris find a significant amount of information that will help abused women.

Scrapbook - Unit 7

10.5.06

I believe the way we search for information, down to what we judge as relevant, is affected by very subjective things. What I mean by this is, if Alex and I are writing a research paper on the very same topic for the very same professor, depending on our mindset that day, one of us may find one document relevant and not another. Our judgments on relevancy or even how we search for documents are affected by everything from our surroundings to what our mood is that day. Making sense of the returned documents or of the system in general, is affected by our emotional mindset - a bad mood or a good mood can change one's outlook quite easily. This doesn't even take into account our individual knowledge of the subject and how that affects the documents we retrieve. From our life experiences, every individual person has a certain amount of knowledge or opinions about certain subjects that affect how the judge documents.

I also think that knowing your personal strengths/limitations for this topic is the same as knowing your personal strengths/limitations for any other topic. It can help you grow as an information seeker - having knowledge of your biases towards information seeking lets you be aware of them, thus preventing some of the affect they have on your information seeking.

In designing any type of system I think it is important to know your audience as much as possible. If you're Google, this may just be impossible! But if you're designing an academic search engine or helping a particular person with their computer woes, you have some room for interpretation. Know who the system is defined for and why they need to use it and you can design an effective system that keeps end users happy!

DB

I posted the information below to the discussion board but felt putting it here was also appropriate.

My tour interests are the information seeking habits of the information poor. In general, how and why do people who typically don't search for information find it? And why is it that they are not typical information seekers? The article I read was on the information seeking habits of women with breast cancer - a very unique perspective from people seeking a very specific type of information. The citation is below:

Rees, C. E. and Bath, P. A. (2001). "Information-Seeking Behaviors of Women with Breast Cancer". Oncology Nursing Forum, Vol. 28, No. 5, pp. 899-907.

The authors distributed 202 surveys and held 3 discussion groups (each with 10 people) to find out how certain people sought information on breast cancer post diagnosis and why others avoided information on the topic altogether. They found that some people are information avoiders - i.e., they don't seek information for fear of worrying. Others are high-monitoring information seekers - they want every piece of information they can find in hopes of feeling in control of the cancer. And then there are the low-monitoring seekers who want enough information to feel educated and 'in the know' so to speak when dealing with doctors. Their conclusions were that information seeking is based on the individual and not on demographic information. That is to say that just because a person was in a certain age group did not mean that they necessarily would or would not seek information; rather, the need to seek information depended on the type of person they were and their past experiences.

This relates to my topic of interest because it shows that people are more than just demographics; every person has valuable life experiences that affect their information seeking behavior. For the information professional, this makes it very difficult to design systems because you have no real target audience, so to speak.

I really enjoy reading the person view of research. In most of our classes we discuss things from a systems perspective (taken the user into account when possible); but it is refreshing to learn about what the people using the system think or how and why they even use our information systems to find information.