Confessional Methods and Everyday Life Information Seeking

摘要

The American Library Association's Jesse H. Shera Award for Excellence in Published Research was given in 2008 to a group of researchers from the Information Behavior in Everyday Contexts (IBEC) group at the University of Washington iSchool. The winning paper by Meyers, Fisher, and Marcoux (2007, p. 311) presents a "holistic" approach to capturing the everyday information habits of pre-teen high school students in the United States. The authors use mixed methods - incentivized focus groups and paired and individual interviews, all undertaken with punctilious compliance with U.S. human subjects research regulations. The protocol for the interview uses a vocabulary that is standard in everyday life information seeking (ELIS) research - "user needs," "information seeking," and, a recent entrant, "information grounds." The award-winning paper focuses on methods, not full results (extensive empirical work had not been completed at the time when the paper was nominated) and it addresses a vogue topic: the everyday habits of "youth" (Agosto & Hughes-Hassell, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Chelton & Cool, 2004, 2007). So what makes this paper a prize winner? The chapter that follows addresses this question by reviewing the methodological context of the paper - a corpus of work that draws on a common repertoire, the "confessional methods" of the title.