Information seeking in a time of war: coping with stress in Lithuania during the Russia/Ukraine war
| Date | 02 January 2025 |
| Pages | 31-62 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2024-0156 |
| Published date | 02 January 2025 |
| Author | Thomas D. Wilson,Elena Maceviciute |
Information seeking in a time of war:
coping with stress in Lithuania during
the Russia/Ukraine war
Thomas D. Wilson
Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Bor
as,
Bor
as, Sweden, and
Elena Maceviciute
Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Bor
as,
Bor
as, Sweden and
Faculty of Communication, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Abstract
Purpose –The aim of the research reported here was to determine how Lithuanian citizens engaged in
information-seeking behaviour in response to the stress caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Design/methodology/approach –An interview survey was designed, using a semi-structured interview schedule.
A convenience sample of 21 participants was obtained and the interviews lasted between 20 and 70 min. The
schedule design was guided by the transactional theory of stress and coping and employed the Perceived Stress Scale.
Findings –A majority of participants experienced moderate to high levels of stress associated with the war in
Ukraine. Information seeking and discussing information found with family members and friends played a
significant role in helping to moderate stress. Most of the participants understood more than one language and,
consequently,were able to compare local information sources with international sources. Only five participants
were active users of social media, the rest were critical of these sources. All participants valued those sources
they believed to be reliable and truthful.
Research limitations/implications –The small convenience sample of educated urban participants limits
generalizability but provides indicative findings for future investigations into information behaviour during
prolonged international conflicts.
Practical implications –The study highlights the importance of media literacy in managing psychological
stress during geopolitical tensions, demonstrating how strategic information seeking and social support can
serve as effective coping mechanisms.
Social implications –The research reveals psychological impacts of war beyond direct conflict zones,
illustrating how communities develop collective emotional resilience through informed, critically engaged
information practices.
Originality/value –The study provides unique insights by examining war-related stress in aneighbouring
country not directly experiencing conflict, applying stress-coping theory to understand intricate information-
seeking behaviours during a geopolitical crisis.
Keywords Stress, Ukraine, Information behaviour, Media use, War,Information-seeking behaviour,
Stress-coping theory
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The war raging in the middle of Europe caused by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February,
2022, is a continuation of a longer armed conflict that began in 2014 and was marked by many
Journal of
Documentation
31
© Thomas D. Wilson and Elena Maceviciute. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is
published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,
distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial
purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence
may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
We thank Indr_
eJovai
sait_
e-Bla
zevi
cien_
eand Fausta Kepalien_
efor their help in carrying out the
interview, as well as our generous respondents, who willingly gave their time. Our thanks also go to the
anonymous referees whose comments have resulted in an improved text.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 29 June 2024
Revised 23 November 2024
Accepted 30 November 2024
Journalof Documentation
Vol.81 No. 7, 2025
pp.31-62
EmeraldPublishing Limited
e-ISSN:1758-7379
p-ISSN:0022-0418
DOI10.1108/JD-06-2024-0156
stressful events in the lives of individuals and nations, e.g. the shooting-down of the Malaysia
Airlines flight 17 over Donetsk on 17th of July, 2014, and the annexation of the Crimea by
Russia earlier the same year.Since the beginning of the “hot” stage of the war, researchers have
explored its impact on a variety of areas of our lives, including war trauma (Javanbakht, 2022),
psychological problems (e.g. Riad et al., 2022) and emotional reactions (Lopatovska et al.,
2022). In these recent publications, the main subjects of research are young people and
refugees and also international students (Awuah et al., 2022;Talabiet al., 2022).
Concerns about the war extend beyond the boundaries of Ukraine: to the north, the country
is bordered by Belarus, whose leader is a strong supporter of President Putin of Russia; further
north are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all former states of the Soviet Union; and, to the west,
Poland, not part of the Soviet Union, but part of the zone of communist influence in central and
eastern Europe. All of these states fear that Putin’s aim is the re-establishment of the Russian
Empire and that if Ukraine falls, they will be the next targets (Figure 1).
It is understandable that citizens of the neighbouring countries will feel stressed by the war.
In a study by an international team of researchers on depression, stress and anxiety levels of
Ukrainians, Poles and Taiwanese, Ukrainians scored the highest levels, followed by Poles,
with the Taiwanese showing much lower levels (Chudzicka-Czupałaet al., 2023). The
Lithuanian market and public opinion research company Spinter research began measuring
the general index of emotional health in Lithuania in 2022. This shows that feelings of anxiety,
tension and stress, resulting from the war in Ukraine, has risen to 25% of the population
(https://spinter.lt/emocines-sveikatos-indeksas-kyla-karas-kelia-stresa-labiau-nei-darbas/).
Though one-quarter of the population is quite a significant indicator, we considered it to be
average having in mind the geopolitical situation of the country with the Russian enclave
Kaliningrad next to Lithuania, with the Suwalki corridor running along its border, providing
road access between Moscow and Kaliningrad, with rail connection running through Lithuania
and direct threats by the Russian government.
Thus, we have formulated our research problem in terms of stress-coping theory and
information behaviour as suitable to explore the citizens in a country affected by the
Russia–Ukraine war but not experiencing its direct impact, as do Ukrainian citizens. Together
with easy linguistic access to Lithuanian respondents (one of the authors is Lithuanian), this
Figure 1.Russia and the Baltic states
JD
81,7
32
indicator led us to think that Lithuanians must be coping with the war-related stress quite well
and it may be a useful study case for the identified problem.
In this article, we begin with a literature review on media use and information behaviour
related to the war in Ukraine and information behaviour in relation to stress-coping research.
Media use in this context means the preference and choice of media channels and contents
using available social and technical structures (McQuail and Deuze, 2020, p. 465). Then we
introduce the theoretical framework, the associated research questions and a qualitative
method of data collection and analysis. The results of the study occupy the central place in the
text and are discussed in the closing part.
Literature review
Information use and the war in Ukraine
A search was carried out on the Web of Science using the queries, ”information seeking and
war”; ”information behaviour” AND war OR “war time” OR “stress of war”. After
systematically screening the initial corpus of 25 articles, we identified seven scholarly works
as most pertinent, having excluded those employing war terminology metaphorically or
utilizing information-related terminology merely incidentally.
A search with the same queries was carried out in Google Scholar and yielded a large
number of studies on information behaviour of various societal groups in crises and threatening
situations, such as natural disasters (Pang, 2014;Lopatovska and Smiley, 2014;Cooper et al.,
2022), pandemics (Kim et al., 2021), health hazards (Choo, 2017) or terror attacks (Ayalon and
Aharony, 2024). We also found an additional 15 articles directly related to our research.
The review is structured systematically: initially examining media studies, information
usage and information behaviour within Ukraine; then exploring comparable dynamics in
nearby nations; then addressing broader scholarly interest in news concerning the
Russia–Ukraine conflict; and concluding with comparative analysis against extant research
on information behaviour during previous armed conflicts.
The found literature shows that most information and communication scholars have
explored the issues of information campaigns and media strategies related to the
Russia–Ukraine war in both its low-intensity stage (before 2022) and later. Such
investigations include the use of the information infrastructure and cyber-power by
Russians (Unwala and Ghori, 2016), the main principles of Russian warfare (Snegovaya,
2015), disinformation on social media (Mejias and Vokuev, 2017) or social media as
propaganda tools (Geissler et al., 2022).
Contemporary hybrid warfare, which began against Ukraine long before the hot stage, uses
all kinds of destabilisation including manipulation of media and disinformation, using modern
technologies of distortion and persuasion (Schemes, 2024). Russia has historically refined
these techniques, strategically leveraging “this ecosystem by combining traditional and digital
tools to reach broad layers of Ukrainian society and its supporters” (Alonso-Mart
ın-Romo
et al., 2023, p. 4). The study reveals how disinformation, propaganda and digital technologies
have reconfigured Ukrainian citizens’ media engagement. Participants now traverse an
intricate informational terrain, from traditional media to “documenting conflict’s quotidian
experiences” (Alonso-Mart
ın-Romo et al., 2023, p. 9). These individuals critically assess their
publications’ international implications while strategically navigating information sources.
Furthermore, they bolster collective resilience through media literacy initiatives, raising
awareness among less-mobilised populations and facilitating critical discernment of
propaganda (Alonso-Mart
ın-Romo et al., 2023, p. 10).
Within information science, Lopatovska et al. (2022) studied the emotional reactions of
Ukrainian adolescents to the military upheaval, exploring how they seek, use or avoid
information from different sources to increase their resilience during this traumatic period. The
researchers explore adolescents’ resilience strategies, finding that adjusting their information
behaviour is key to managing traumatic stressors.
Journal of
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33
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