Picture map of Europe with pins indicating European capital cities

Open Access research with a European policy impact...

The Strathprints institutional repository is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde's Open Access research outputs. Strathprints provides access to thousands of Open Access research papers by Strathclyde researchers, including by researchers from the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC).

EPRC is a leading institute in Europe for comparative research on public policy, with a particular focus on regional development policies. Spanning 30 European countries, EPRC research programmes have a strong emphasis on applied research and knowledge exchange, including the provision of policy advice to EU institutions and national and sub-national government authorities throughout Europe.

Explore research outputs by the European Policies Research Centre...

Strathprints

Using internet groups in situations of information poverty : topics and information needs

Hasler, Laura and Ruthven, Ian and Buchanan, Steven (2014) Using internet groups in situations of information poverty : topics and information needs. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65 (1). pp. 25-36. ISSN 1532-2890

[img] Microsoft Word
jasist_info_pov.doc - Accepted Author Manuscript
Download (161kB)

Abstract

This study explores the use of online newsgroups and discussion groups by people in situations of information poverty. Through a qualitative content analysis of 200 posts from across Internet groups, we identify topics and information needs expressed by people who feel they have no other sources of support available to them. We uncover various health, wellbeing, social and identity issues which are not only crucial to the lives of the people posting, but which they are unwilling to risk revealing elsewhere – offering evidence that these online environments provide an outlet for the expression of needs in situations of critical and hidden information need. To enable this analysis, we first describe our method for reliably identifying situations of information poverty in messages posted to these groups and our coding approach. Our work contributes to the study of both information seeking within the context of information poverty and the use of Internet groups as sources of information and support, bridging the two by exploring the manifestation of information poverty in this particular online setting.

Item type: Article
ID code: 43133
Keywords: internet groups, information poverty, topics, information needs, online newsgroups , discussion groups, Electronic computers. Computer science, Information resources, Artificial Intelligence, Software, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction
Subjects: Science > Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science
Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Information resources
Department: Faculty of Science > Computer and Information Sciences
Depositing user: Pure Administrator
Date deposited: 05 Mar 2013 14:21
Last modified: 21 Sep 2017 11:10
Related URLs:
URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/43133
Export data:
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)