Who will you ask? An empirical study of interpersonal task information seeking

✍ Scribed by Yunjie (Calvin) Xu; Bernard C.Y. Tan; Li Yang

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 269 KB
• Volume: 57
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1532-2882
• DOI: 10.1002/asi.20339

✦ Synopsis

Information seeking behavior is an important form of human behavior. Past literature in information science and organizational studies has employed the cost-benefit framework to analyze seekers' information-source choice decision. Conflicting findings have been discovered with regard to the importance of source quality and source accessibility in seekers' choices. With a focus on interpersonal task information seeking, this study proposes a seeker-source-information need framework to understand the source choice decision. In this framework, task importance, as an attribute of information need, is introduced to moderate seekers' cost-benefit calculation. Our empirical study finds that in the context of interpersonal task information seeking, first, the least effort principle might not be adequate in explaining personal source choices; rather, a quality-driven perspective is more adequate, and cost factors are of much less importance. Second, the seeker-source relationship is not significant to source choices. Third, the nature of information need, especially task importance, can modify seekers' source choice decisions.