Social relevance assessments for virtual worlds. Interpersonal source selection in the context of chronic illness
| Published date | 09 October 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2016-0096 |
| Date | 09 October 2017 |
| Pages | 1209-1227 |
| Author | Kaitlin Light Costello |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Social relevance assessments
for virtual worlds
Interpersonal source selection in the context
of chronic illness
Kaitlin Light Costello
Department of Library and Information Science, Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of social relevance assessments, which are
judgments made by individuals when they seek out information within virtual social worlds such as online
support groups (OSGs).
Design/methodology/approach –Constructivist grounded theory was employed to examine the
phenomenon of information exchange in OSGs for chronic kidney disease. In-depth interviews were
conducted with 12 participants, and their posts in three OSGs were also harvested. Data were analyzed using
inductive content analysis and the constant comparative method. Theoretical sampling was conducted until
saturation was reached. Member checking, peer debriefing, and triangulation were used to verify results.
Findings –There are two levels of relevance assessment that occur when people seek out information in
OSGs. First, participants evaluate the OSG to determine whether or not the group is an appropriate place for
information exchange about kidney disease. Second, participants evaluate individual users on the OSG to see
if they are appropriate people with whom to exchange information. This often takes the form of similarity
assessment, whereby people try to determine whether or not they are similar to specific individuals on the
forums. They use a variety of heuristics to assess similarity as part of this process.
Originality/value –This paper extends the author’s understanding of relevance in information science in
two fundamental ways. Within the context of social information exchange, relevance is socially constructed
and is based on social characteristics, such as age, shared beliefs, and experience. Moreover, relevance is
assessed both when participants seek out information and when they disclose information, suggesting that
the conception of relevance as a process that occurs primarily during information seeking is limited.
Keywords Internet, World Wide Web, Behaviour, Information science, Theory, Health
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This paper describes how people diagnosed with a chronic disease assess the relevance of
health information provided by other patients in online support groups (OSGs). Relevance
assessment is typically framed as a dynamic process in which a user assesses the relevance
of an object or a surrogate of that object. Our understanding of how people assess
information provided by other people, however, largely remains limited to studies
examining expertise location within formal work environments or to small worlds and
information grounds, where co-presence is a key factor that shapes information behavior.
There are few investigations of information seeking from human sources in other, less
formal, contexts, particularly those that occur in online communities. This paper presents
results from a two-year grounded theory study examining online health information
behaviors among individuals diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD). This paper
offers a stratified model of social relevance assessments derived from the data, along with
examples of the methods people use to assess the relevance of other individuals within
OSGs for CKD. This model extends our understanding of relevance assessments, Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 6, 2017
pp. 1209-1227
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2016-0096
Received 21 July 2016
Revised 1 March 2017
Accepted 19 March 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The author would like to thank Dr Barbara Wildemuth, doctoral advisor, for her suggestions and
guidance on this paper. The author would also like to thank the participants.
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Social
relevance
assessments
illustrating that they are made not only when seeking information, but also when disclosing
information. The paper closes with suggestions for future research transferring the model to
other contexts.
Literature review
Relevance
Relevance is generally understood as an assessment of the effectiveness of information
exchange within a specific context; the exchange can occur between two or more people,
or between people and information objects (Saracevic, 1996), and is complex and
multidimensional (Borlund, 2003). In person-to-information-object exchanges, systems infer
relevance by applying algorithmic analysis to a corpus of information objects or document. This
is the type of relevance focused on by most scholarly literature on the topic. This algorithmic,
or “systems-oriented,”relevance examines the relationship between user-generated queries and
information objects within that system, which are retrieved by a specific algorithm or procedure.
This research positions relevance as a quality inherent in the information objects being retrieved.
User-oriented relevance, conversely, is subjective and posits that relevance is a quality
not inherent to the source; rather, it is relational and subjective and is a human judgment
subject to change. For example, judgments may change over time or in relation to the
cognitive state of the user. Relevance is multidimensional, and there are multiple
manifestations of user-oriented relevance, including –but not limited to –topical relevance,
or aboutness; cognitive relevance, or novelty and informativeness; situational relevance, or
the utility and usefulness of information; motivational relevance, or the affective dimension
of relevance; and socio-cognitive relevance, which takes multiple actors and their individual
subjective relevance assessments into account. These manifestations of relevance interact
with one another and are interdependent (Saracevic, 1997).
Source selection. Relevance and source selection are related but not synonymous
(e.g. Savolainen and Kari, 2004). Source preferences are judged earlier in the seeking process
than relevance; often, relevance assessment occurs when people attempt to determine the
potential for information use (Savolainen, 2008). Generally, people prefer to get information
from other people (e.g. Allen, 1984; Sonnenwald, 1999) rather than consulting information
systems, documents, or data. The majority of the research on source selection is workplace
based and focuses on organizational communication, collaborative problem solving, and
trust (van den Boer et al., 2016; Fidel and Green, 2004; Hertzum, 2002; Marton and
Choo, 2002; Woudstra et al., 2012; Zimmer et al., 2007). There is also a growing body of
literature that addresses source selection in informal, everyday information seeking
(Agosto and Hughes-Hassell, 2006; Hartel, 2006; Savolainen, 2008, 2010) using the concept of
information horizons (Sonnenwald and Wildemuth, 2001).
Research on interpersonal source selection, however, focuses less on relevance judgments
than on a set of other qualities used to evaluate interpersonal sources, such as accessibility
and quality and theinteraction between the two. Accessibility is oftenposited as a key factor
in human source selection, and is invoked alongside the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949).
In fact, early researchin this area argued that source accessibility is the onlycriterion people
use when selecting human sources (Gerstberger and Allen, 1968), something that many later
studies refute(Fidel and Green, 2004; Marton andChoo, 2002; Woudstra et al., 2012).Quality is
also a factor in interpersonal source selection. Quality, which can be likened to situational
relevance, is often defined as value or usefulness, and is typically a characteristic that is
inferred using heuristics (Zimmer et al., 2007). According to Woudstra et al. (2012), relevan ce
(usefulness) andreliability (source credibility)are the two components of quality assessment;
however, as previously mentioned, usefulness is only one facet of relevance, because
usefulness is synonymous with situational relevance, not with relevance more broadly.
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