Human Information Interaction: An Ecological Approach to Information Behavior

4 Information Need and the Decision Ladder

4 Information Need and the Decision Ladder The concept information need is fundamental to human information interaction across all its areas of research. For instance, evaluating information is carried out in reference to an information need, and representing information is guided by predictions about the information needs of the actors for whom the representation is constructed. Similarly , sharing information takes place to satisfy an actor’s information need, and filtering information is conducted to satisfy future needs. However, scholars in human information behavior (HIB), and in particular in information-seeking behavior (ISB), have studied this concept more than scholars in any other area. An information need is the foundation on which the seeking process rests, as all search decisions and activities —such as query formulation, relevance judgment, and ending a search—are guided by the need. This essential position is also reflected in HIB’s cognitive models (see section 3.3), which all center on information need, although they present it at times by using different terms. Although an information need may change during the search process,1 an information need is always present. By its very definition, a search for information takes place when there is a need; when there is no need, there is no search.2 Intuitively, the concept seems simple and straightforward, but when it is considered an object of study, information need becomes complex and slippery. One sticky issue is how we can define need in a way that distinguishes it from non-needs. Scholars in information science—and in other social sciences as well—have been discussing its definition for several decades with no agreed-upon conclusion. Even when a researcher has accepted a certain definition, it is not simple to empirically distinguish between a genuine information need and what seems to be one but is actually something else. 4.1 Definitional Challenges Among HIB scholars, Robert S. Taylor was the most influential in the study of the information need. He followed Mackay’s (1960) description of a state of need: “a 84 Chapter 4 certain incompleteness in [an actor’s] picture of the world—an inadequacy in what we might call his ‘state of readiness’ to interact purposefully with the world around him” (cited in Taylor 1968, 180). Guided by this idea of an information need, Taylor identified four consecutive cognitive stages in which a need develops (he notes that not all needs complete their development at the time an actor interacts with an information system): Q1—the actual, but unexpressed need for information (the visceral need); Q2—the conscious, within-brain description of the need (the conscious need); Q3—the formal statement of the need (the formalized need); Q4—the question as presented to the information system (the compromised need). (Taylor 1968, 182) That is, in the visceral stage, an actor feels a sense of uneasiness, vaguely recognizing a state of incompleteness. In the conscious stage, he can identify the area of incompleteness . If he continues to develop the information need, it would arrive at the formalized stage in which he describes the area in concrete terms, making it as explicit as possible. To submit the formalized information need to an information system, the actor is likely to present a compromised information need. Various conditions may call for a compromised version, such as the requirement to translate the need into the system’s language, the tendency to ask for what one expects to be able to get, and a desire to protect privacy by concealing the “real” need, particularly when its subject is sensitive. This analysis of a need’s formation has had great impact on conceptual developments in the cognitive approach of HIB, and its rigor and value are still being discussed (e.g., Nicolaisen 2009; Cole 2011), although much less frequently than in the early research period. Nevertheless, several definitions and views of information need have emerged independently. 4.1.1 The Shift from Information Need to Task Naumer and Fisher (2009) reviewed and analyzed the concept of information need in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. They offered several examples of early definitions that echoed Taylor’s construal of an information need: Notable definitions of information need cited by Dervin and Nilan include: “a conceptual incongruity in which the person’s cognitive structure is not adequate to a task” [Ford 1980], “when a person recognizes something wrong in his or her state of knowledge and wishes to resolve the anomaly” [Belkin 1978], “when the...