Making Sense of Sense Making | Diana L. Ascher, PhD, MBA

Running Head: MAKING SENSE

Making Sense of Sense-Making:
An Examination of Case’s Interpretation Of Sense-Making Theory
Jane C. Daugherty
University of Alabama

Making Sense of Sense Making:
An Examination of Case’s Interpretation of Sense-Making Theory

The scope and breadth of the work done on information behaviors is enormous.  According to Donald O. Case, author of Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior, 2nd Edition, 2007, “Information seeking is a topic that has been written about in over 10,000 documents from several distinct disciplines…almost everything to do with humans is potentially relevant to this topic…” (Case, 2007, p. 14).  Case has written a text that serves as a guidebook for researchers, methodologists, experts, and novice students of information behavior related fields.  To do so in a reasonably digestible fashion, Case selected and referenced only the most pertinent work of the twenty years prior to the publication of the first edition of the book in 2002, with select references to the crucially important theorists and researchers of information behavior pioneer work prior to 1980.
With this selectivity in mind, Case introduces his text by using an edited version of Brenda Dervin’s ten assumptions, or “myths,” as re-characterized by Case, that had hindered information research prior to 1976.  That one of Dervin’s key publications is paraphrased within the first ten pages of Case’s book highlights the importance that Case places on her work in general. Case provides a comprehensive distilled overview of the body of sense-making literature; his approach from a current perspective enables a framework of updated understanding about the importance of Dervin’s Sense-Making theory and the connected methodology as a turning point for information behavior studies in the context of the past several decades of work in the field.
This paper will first attempt to construct a definition of sense-making by using some of the primary sources cited by Case and will then examine Case’s presentation of sense-making.  In the most extensive section of the paper, a review of the important facets of the some of the literature cited in conjunction with user-orientation and sense-making theory will be examined within the framework of its contribution to or derivation from the primary sense-making texts.  Finally, the paper will reflect on the characterization of the entire Case text by several reviews and my personal view of the text as a guide for study.

Defining Sense-Making
Dervin’s Work
Essential to explaining the meaning of sense-making as Dervin uses the terminology are the problematic facets of the words themselves and their parallel uses in other areas of study, particularly in ethnomethodology (EM), a sociological discipline. “Sense-Making” must be distinguished from “ ‘sense making,’ which encompasses the phenomenon of making and unmaking sense” (Tidline, 2005, p. 113). When in “What are Sense Making Practices?” (1975) James Heap examines the terms from this standpoint, he laments that even “the literature in EM provides us with no explicit definitions of sense making practices. Nor is it anywhere explained what is meant by the equally important notion ‘features of sense-making’” (Heap, 1975, p. 107). Heap went on to analyze the theoretical work that had been done from a sociological standpoint on sense-making and attempts to classify the terms, but he does not succeed fully in defining them, only in critiquing the incompleteness of the work that had been done until that time. This leaves the door wide open for Brenda Dervin to appropriate the terms for communication and information theory and research.
Dervin begins by refuting the previous assumptions of information behavior research in her 1976 article for the Journal of Broadcasting. The most important part of this is her rejection of an objective nature of reality when it is created and interpreted by human beings. “[W]e continue to assume that objective information about reality is attainable…that we can have complete knowledge and knowledge is orderable…that there is a given order and we are but discovering and confirming it” (Dervin, 1976a, p. 325). She discards this premise, saying that “[t]his view of knowledge and information leads to an underlying premise about humankind that does not correspond to how we know people have operated and how people need to operate” (Dervin, 1976a, p. 325). The old assumptions did not make sense for the ways that we know, according to common sense, that human beings act and interact with information. Dervin challenges the old approach to system-oriented studies and states what seems obvious: humans are not machines. “[E]vidence from perception research shows that…humans…take external information and organize it within their own already collected internal information, and they thereby make sense out of their world” (Dervin, 1976a, p. 326).
Sense-making theory is first articulated as such in Dervin’s 1983 “Information as User Construct” article for Knowledge Structure and Use: Implications for Synthesis and Interpretation. Dervin states that:
Information processing and use are, within the context of relativistic assumptions about information, sense-making activities. The emphasis here is on the word ‘making,’ for it denotes that the perceiver of the information is not an empty bucket but is actively making sense. (Dervin, 1983, pp. 164-5)
The empowerment of the user in creation of meaning is central to sense-making ideology. She goes on to say that “the individual, in her time and place, needs to make sense, by definition. But the sense she needs to make is for her world, her time and place…her head is filled with questions…these questions can be seen as her information needs” (Dervin, 1983, p. 170). When individual “sense runs out…[and] sense frequently runs out” (Dervin, 1983, p. 171), “Sense-Making mandates that communicating be conceptualized as gap bridging…in the sense of gap-bridging as a mandate of the human condition” (Dervin, 2005, p. 27), and this gap bridging occurs constantly across time and space as an ever-changing perceptive human project (Dervin 1983, 1984, 2005).
Dervin took this theory and created the methodology explicated and operationalized in the 1984 study she helped to conduct with several other researchers from the University of California on the information needs of Californians. She explicitly refers to Sense-Making theory and its use in previous studies, and characterized the theory as belonging “in the sub-set called ‘user’ studies” and as “a constructivistic process” (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 7). Information is defined in this context as “anything that allows the individual to make sense” (Dervin et. al., 1984, p. 14). The new assumption of the Sense-Making approach is “that the most valid way to assess information needs, and thus potential system intersections with people, is to have respondents reconstruct actual experiences they have already had” thus the better to assess the construction of “sense in an ever-changing reality as he/she moves through time-space” and to examine the process of “gap-bridging” (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 15). This is illustrated through several models built from the perspective of the user and her relationship to the system as well as her movement through time-space (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 12, 17). The Sense-Making data collection methodology is operationalized in the “Micro-Moment Time-Line interview,” in which “Time Line Steps” in information seeking behaviors are defined as they happen by the respondent (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 19). The data gathered were usually in the form of “SITUATION-GAP-USE” statements which were “collected and their contents analyzed both inductively and deductively” and from which “neutral questioning procedures” were drawn (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 21-2).
Two other scholars illuminate the explanations provided by this incomplete review of writings on Sense-Making. In 1993, Reijo Savolainen takes a critical approach to Sense-Making in his article “The Sense-Making Theory: Reviewing the Interest of a User-Centered Approach to Information Seeking and Use” for Information Processing and Management. Savolainen posits that “[s]ense-making theory suggests new theoretical and methodological ideas revealing the importance of subjective and cognitive factors in the description and explanation of informational phenomena…[and] the theory is applicable in contexts wider than just information seeking” (Savolainen, 1993, p. 15). He also notes the fact that “the definition of the concept of sense appears to be flexible indeed” (Savolainen, 1993, p. 16), an observation that the author made in her examination of the concept as well, and one that makes grasping the exact nature of Sense-Making more difficult. Quoting Dervin from 1989, Savolainen offers the explanation of Sense-Making as simply hard to pin down definitionally:
‘Some people call it a theory, others a set of methods, others a methodology, others a body of findings. In the most general sense, it is all of these. It is, first and foremost, a set of metatheoretic assumptions and propositions about the nature of information, the nature of human use of information, and the nature of human communicating.’ (Savolainen, 1993, p. 16)
Savolainen suggests that sense-making theory can have positive repercussions for both researchers and subjects, in that researchers learn a great deal about peoples’ cognitive processes and that study participants learn about the way that they face problematic situations (Savolainen, 1993, p. 25). He suggests that the main contribution of sense-making theory to the field of information behavior research may be the overall shift in research emphasis to the user and the realities of the “limitations of the intermediary-centered approach” (Savolainen, 1993, p. 27).
Tonyia J. Tidline’s contribution to Theories of Information Behavior, “Dervin’s Sense-Making,” provided a much more explanatory examination of Sense-Making theory and its methodological application. She examined the varied settings in which Sense-Making methodology has been utilized for user studies, such as the disciplines that found it useful and the communication practices that it had been used to examine, and listed the operationalizations of the methodology (which have already been mentioned here). Tidline illustrated the evolution of the theory and its “progress[ion] from early analysis of the situations, gaps, and uses surrounding a human information ‘need,’ the methodology now stresses verbing (Dervin, 1993), which could allow LIS scholars to…achieve holistic understanding of information activity” (Tidline, 2005, p. 114). She goes on to explore the possibilities of this new addition to Sense-Making and how the methodology can be used in conjunction with “other epistemological agendas,” and concludes that “Sense-Making and narrative analysis offer potential for discovering new vistas of information behavior” (Tidline, 2005, p. 116).

Case’s Presentation
Sense-making is introduced in the first ten pages of the book as the “preferred way of describing the phenomena” with which this book is primarily concerned (Case, 2007, p. 6). Dervin’s terms pepper the following chapters and were used to better describe all manner of information behaviors. On page 43, Case gave us the succinct definition that “sense making information reflects the procedures and behaviors that allow us to ‘move’ between external and internal information to understand the world, and usually to act on that understanding as well.” There are two sections of the book devoted exclusively to the theory. The first section looks first at Artandi’s (1973) work and provides the ever-elusive definition of sense as “the production of meaning” (Case, 2007, p. 75). The second section addressing sense-making (which Case does not capitalize, as everything included in this text is meant to illuminate information theory and will not be confused with sociological concepts) begins by addressing the ambiguities of the concept, in that it cannot even be classified singularly as a paradigm, theory, or methodology (Case, 2007, p. 158). Case goes on to distill the primary tenets of sense-making, including internal reality creation and the focus on how individuals cope with problematic situations (Case, 2007, p. 159).
Case, overall, presents a picture of sense-making theory as being the most logical approach to understanding why human beings seek information and how they use that information. After examining the text in full, it is apparent that this is how Case views sense-making, too, because this view is transmitted directly to the novice student of information behavior. The appeal lies in its examination of normal people in everyday information seeking situations, and it can be directly related to the reader’s personal experiences. When considering how the myriad theories, methods, and paradigms of library science can be applied in future professional settings, it is sometimes difficult to see how these lofty ideas will be applicable in, say, a public library. Not so with sense-making; at least, not so with Case’s description of the concept. It is easy to see how sense-making can be used to further understand the non-expert library user and better inform library practice to serve this average citizen. Dervin’s insistence that it would be detrimental to the profession to continue to ignore and thereby denigrate everyday information behaviors appeals to the future public librarian’s sense of the importance of “trivial” information needs. Herein lies the attraction of the sense-making concept.

Overview of Sense-Making Predecessors, Postulators, and Progeny
Foundations of Sense-Making Philosophy
Case places the roots of sense-making theory in the work of John Dewey and George Kelly in the early 1960’s (Case, 2007, p. 158). Dewey’s earlier work deals with several concepts central to sense-making, such as the personal creation of meaning and the nature of communication and language. In his 1910 essay “Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought,” Dewey examines three hypothetical instances of thought leading to action or conclusion on the part of the hypothetical person (Dewey, 1910). This particular analysis is important in that Dewey identifies the precursor to the gaps that are central to sense-making as an explanation; he calls this a “felt difficulty” that leads to problem definition and solution seeking behavior (Dewey, 1910, p. 72). Also, in his 1925 essay “Nature, Communication, and Meaning,” the nature of communication and language is assessed as an interactive process that sets humans apart from the lower animals (Dewey, 1925). He characterizes meaning thusly: “Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense… meaning is the acquisition of significance by things in their status in making possible and fulfilling shared cooperation…” (Dewey, 1925, p. 55). The notion that communication is a negotiation and that meaning is constructed through this negotiation provides an important foundation for the assertion non-objective quality of personal sense construction.
Years later, in his 1968 article “Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking,” Robert S. Taylor suggested that the future of library studies was in user-centered research as opposed to system-oriented research, albeit in an indirect way. He suggested, in response to new fears of technology sounding the death knell of libraries, that in response to these monumental changes, that libraries would evolve with the times and make the transition into a more techno-centric time, and the way that this would be facilitated would be through changing the relationship between library users and library systems (Taylor, 1968, p. 178). Framed with suggestions that his observations should be a starting place for further study, Taylor provided a model for the question-negotiation process that takes place between the librarian and the user and the “prenegotiation decisions by the inquirer,” which can be recognized as an early model of general information-seeking that prioritizes the inquirer over the institution (Taylor, 1968, p. 181). In this model, the library is not the first step in seeking the answer, but merely a step along a whole process. Taylor then goes on to illustrate the levels of question development that the librarian must negotiate in order to have the best possible outcome for the reference interview. Taylor’s article dramatically shifted the focus of research inquiry from system use to system user, laying the foundation for the work to come.
Susan Artandi took the mathematical concept of communication into a new realm with her suggestion that the idea of meaning and the accurate transmission of semantic information had to be considered when discussing human communication (Artandi, 1973, p. 243). Her 1973 article “Information Concepts and their Utility” included an examination of the differences between Shannon’s accepted model of a communication system and introduced syntactic, semantic, semiotic, and pragmatic considerations when the model was applied to humans; that is, subjective meaning must be examined when studying any aspect of human information transmission and reception (Artandi, 1973). This implied that humans are not perfect, mechanized processing units, but can and do interpret messages individually. Humans interact with information in ways that had not been fully considered previously with system-oriented studies. She also makes the assertion that:
To reduce uncertainty information must be ‘relevant’ in the sense that is can be integrated and evaluated by the individual in terms of his prior experiences (his existing state) and his possible future states and activities. This in turn implies that information which is not relevant or which is not new to the individual is not information since neither is capable of reducing his state of uncertainty; while negative information is in fact information. (Artandi, 1973, p. 244)
The assumption that information must reduce uncertainty is one that has certainly come into question in the past several decades of research, but Artandi was one of the first to postulate some of these interrelated information concepts.
With these suggestions of the role of humans in communication and information interpretation and transmission, in 1976 Brenda Dervin made some groundbreaking contributions to the way that information studies would be approached for the foreseeable future. As a guest editor for the Journal of Broadcasting’s Summer issue in 1976, Dervin set out a new course for the field by questioning, first, the nature of reality—“[d]oes humankind discover reality (and, therefore, simply collect information about it)? Or does it create and invent reality?” (Dervin, 1976a, p. 325). Dervin looks at the dichotomous nature of most prior research and declares it unrealistic, because “adaptation and creation are simultaneous and continuing human activities (in the collective sense, [and] no amount of ‘objective’ information can possibly describe reality” (Dervin, 1976a, p. 326). She then suggested three new definitions for information that would be useful in the context of actual information behavior by real human beings, definitions that allow for personal interpretation of meaning and legitimizes this role in information (Dervin, 1976a, p. 326). These definitions provide a jumping-off point for her to introduce ten flawed assumptions of previous research as positions to avoid in future research (Dervin, 1976a, p. 327-33). Dervin refutes each of these assumptions in turn and, in doing so, makes an argument that would be so important that the future critical work that cites this early article universally ignores the fact that it was the first section of a three-part article.
Also in 1976, Dervin contributed the second chapter of Information for the Community, M. Kochen and J. C. Donahue, eds. In “The Everyday Information Needs of the Average Citizen: A Taxonomy for Analysis,” she suggested that the solution for the increasing information demands of commerce and society was not only in greater sophistication for information systems, but also in greater understanding of general information needs of all information seekers, not just current information system users. Dervin provides a model of “the information system within which the average citizen operates,” an illustration that is notable for its de-emphasis of the information sources and which places information needs at the center of the triangle, with the individual citizen at the top, while neglecting to equate information sources with solutions to information needs (Dervin, 1976b, p.21). Again, Dervin was revolutionary in suggesting a shift away from expert user studies to study of the average citizen, and also in her logic in placing the user and their needs as the focus of study. She was one of the first to do such research, and in doing so began to cement the validation of qualitative study as the more applicable avenue of methodology. In this chapter, Dervin notes the disconnectedness of the average citizen from formal information resources, and this would be a refrain in work to follow as an essential starting point for legitimizing everyday information seeking as an avenue of study in order to better shape formal information systems to draw these non-users. The studies that had been done up until that time had been slim in their data about behavior as opposed to use; this again highlighted a need for further study (Dervin, 1976b).
The next two articles that build on this need to re-orient library studies to focus on the user involve N. J. Belkin’s work on information concepts. In his article “Progress in Documentation: Information Concepts for Information Science,” for the Journal of Documentation, Belkin addresses the development of “a suitable concept of information for information science” (Belkin, 1978, p. 55). The problem of actually defining information in any context is one that is addressed again and again throughout the literature, and, as this concept is central to not only sense-making theory, but all information science theory, the term is one to be grappled with. Importantly for Dervin’s theorizing, Belkin states that:
The behavioural requirements of an information concept for information science depend upon the observed behaviour of users with respect to information…different users respond to the same set of data differentially…the same user will respond to the same set of data differentially at different times…the nature of a user’s response depends to some extent upon the presentation of the data…(Belkin, 1978, p. 60)
This places the power of interpretation and the creation and application of meaning for information in the mind of the user, as opposed to assuming that there is a set, objective meaning to be taken from the information at hand. This movement away from an objective view of information is crucial for the sense-making work to follow. After an extensive review of several other schools of information definition, Belkin introduces his model of a communication system of information science, of which the key element is the Anomalous State of Knowledge, or ASK (Belkin, 1978, p. 81). In the ASK model, the “recipient…recognize[es] an anomaly in her/his state of knowledge…then converts this anomalous state of knowledge (ASK) into some communicable structure…” (Belkin, 1978, p. 81). The term anomaly means that “the user’s state of knowledge with repect to a topic is in some way inadequate with respect to the person’s ability to achieve some goal” and was used “to indicate that this state…could be due not only to lack of knowledge, but may other problems, such as uncertainty…” (Belkin, 2005, p. 45).
Belkin, Oddy, and Brooks made an important contribution in their proposal for an information retrieval system based on the ASK model and presented in the June 1982 Journal of Documentation. They take the initial ASK theory one step further and suggest that “for the purposes of IR [information retrieval], it is more suitable to attempt to describe that ASK, than for the user to specify her/his need as a request to the system” (Belkin, Oddy, and Brooks, 1982, p. 62). In proposing this model, these theorists re-oriented the system to the exact specifications of the user as opposed to trying to better orient the user to the system, by applying the “cognitive viewpoint,” which acknowledges that “interactions of humans…are mediated by their states of knowledge” and looks at “the IR situation as a recipient-controlled communication system, aimed at resolving the expressed information needs of humans…” (Belkin, Oddy, and Brooks, 1982, p. 65). Humans, and the way that humans realistically communicate with each other and create meaning for themselves became the focus of the work being done.

Primary Sense-Making Work
“Measuring Aspects of Information Seeking: A Test of a Quantitative/ Qualitative Methodology,” by Brenda Dervin, Thomas L. Jacobson, and Michael S. Nilan, appeared in the Communication Yearbook 6 in 1982. In this article, the researchers explicated a study conducted with the radically different methodology of the “time-line” approach (Dervin, Jacobson, and Nilan, 1982). This new approach was developed in response to the observed three assumptions of the traditional information-theoretic approach that were “unnecessarily restrictive when applied to human behavior”: the assumption that “information is something that describes an external reality,” that “information is something that can potentially provide a complete description of reality,” and that “information is adequately quantified on a single, continuous, numerical scale”—all flawed in their mathematical precision that was completely inapplicable to human behavior studies (Dervin, Jacobson, and Nilan, 1982, pp. 420-1). These assumptions contributed to “a disciplinary contradiction…a lack of progress…unhelpful audience myths…and a growing polarization between quantitative and non-quantitative researchers” (Dervin, Jacobson, and Nilan, 1982, pp. 422-3). The alternative time-line approach was meant to address some of these rifts and worked on entirely reflexive and new assumptions, and the major terminologies of Dervin’s Sense-Making were used to operationalize some observed behaviors that were a part of the study, like sense making, information seeking, gap-bridging, and question asking. The result of the study was “strong support for the general hypothesis predicting differences in information-seeking emphasis and success between different qualities of gap-bridging” and the characterization of the results as “logical” (Dervin, Jacobson, and Nilan, 1984, p. 439).
The year after the “Measuring Aspects” article was published, Dervin took another step to advance information and communication studies and proposed that a reason that information professionals were not utilizing the available social sciences literature and research to further their professional development was because of the unrealistic assumptions and non-applicability of the work done up until that time. In “Information as a User Construct: the Relevance of Perceived Information Needs to Synthesis and Interpretation,” (Dervin, 1983) a primary problem with the preceding years of research was identified to be its lack of common sense about the nature of human beings and their information seeking behaviors. She noted that “despite a large volume of literature on decision making and information processing we still know very little about the strategies people use to resolve their information needs” (Dervin, 1983, p. 157). An excellent analogy was introduced in this article—the “bricks into a bucket” illustration that so accurately portrays most of the prior user research. On page 160, Dervin posited that “the research that has produced the dismal portrait of nonuse of information…[is] guided by two central assumptions: one is that information can be treated like a brick; the other is that people can be treated like empty buckets into which bricks can be thrown” (Dervin, 1983).
She went on to say that “direct or empty bucket effects are not what is going on. We all know that… [W]e hang on to the ideas of absolute knowledge and absolute information given to us by science” (Dervin, 1983, p. 162). This is an important basis for Dervin’s propositions about the value of qualitative research for the information sciences because the objective, quantifiable values of data that are required for pure quantitative research are not possible when dealing with the ways that humans create meaning and interpret information for themselves. Here Dervin introduces the idea that “[i]nformation processing and use are, within the context of relativistic assumptions about information, sense-making activities” (Dervin, 1983, p. 164). Later, Dervin observes that “our perceptual equipment is limited and controlled by our minds so that what is observed is constrained by what our minds envision…humans must make sense where none is given because that is the human condition” (Dervin, 1983, p. 169).
From there, Dervin moved directly into applying the synthesis of all of these interrelated ideas about user-centric research and personal meaning creation by altering the methodology used for studying human information interaction and utilizing the Sense-Making paradigm. In a study commissioned by the state of California on “The Information Needs of Californians- 1984,” Dervin and colleagues from the University of California used sense-making theory to do a large-scale qualitative assessment, again using the “time-line” questioning approach to gather relevant data. In the introduction to the study, the researchers state that this theory was used in a similar study in California in 1979, and was used even earlier in a 1975 study in Seattle, among other smaller-scale studies that step “outside the context of the person’s intersection with the…system into the person’s wider life context” (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 6, 11). In this same introduction, several models of the prior research tradition and the differences between these methods and more traditional methods are presented, models that illustrate placing the system at the center versus the user-centric model (Dervin, et. al., 1984, p. 12). Prior research was evaluated and found to be lacking, and the need for the changes made were posited and justified.

The Turning Point
At this point there had been over a decade of respected scholars, researchers, and theorists calling for a change in the overall approach to information behavior studies. Dervin’s work and theory could not be ignored, simply because it made too much sense. In the same year as Dervin’s California study, T. D. Wilson wrote an article called “The Cognitive Approach to Information-Seeking Behaviour and Information Use” for the journal of Social Science Information Studies, in which he called for a change in the human focus of information studies behavior from scientists to the average citizen (Wilson, 1984). “To treat all potential users of information as though they were scientists and to regard all contexts of work as the same as the context within which science is carried on is, to say the least, ‘unscientific’”(Wilson, 1984, p. 200). To fully understand the “processes of information seeking,” he said that we must conduct studies on the average user’s everyday information needs (Wilson, 1984)—a suggestion nearly identical to Dervin’s continued exhortation for similar work. He went on to illustrate the differences in work-related information behavior and scientific, or “expert” information seeking using a study (INISS) of document use statistics and the reasons for examining those documents in a state social services department (Wilson, 1984, p. 202-203).
What followed in 1986 was the oft-cited Dervin and Michael Nilan review of the “post-1978 literature on information needs and uses” for the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, or ARIST (Dervin and Nilan, 1986). In this review, Dervin and Nilan ambitiously sought to evaluate and redirect the concepts that are central to information needs and uses research due to a perceived “concern for conceptual impoverishment in the information needs and uses literature [that] has run through past ARIST chapters like a thin but obvious thread…” (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 3). They asserted that “the literature points to a major tension between information science research and practice…[that] results from the charge that studies have not informed practice” (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 5), and they make four propositions, culled from the body of information science research and the resulting literature, that call for a turn away from system-oriented research to the user and her everyday information use in order to keep information systems relevant (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 6-8). The key to change was in that “most of the studies continue to observe users in terms of systems while a few studies are finding ways to observe users in terms of users” (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, p. 9). They go on to enumerate the systems-oriented studies and their various approaches to data collection and the constraints that they put on any observation of real user needs, by defining themselves in terms of the system and its needs as opposed to the user.
The most dramatic part of the 1986 ARIST review was the “Call for a Paradigm Shift” that began on page 12 and outlined six categories in which the “traditional” and “alternative” paradigms are compared and assessed. Dervin and Nilan examined the false assumption of objectivity and the subjectivity inherent in human information behavior; the flawed model of person as passive machine (remember the bucket?) instead of active meaning creator; the ever-changing space-time dimension of human behavior and how that effects information use; the isolation of user interaction with the system as the only point of research, as opposed to whole information behavior processes, of which system interaction is only a final resort of great effort; the tension between observable and internal processes; and finally, the holdover from strictly quantitative, empirical, scientific research that the human system is too chaotic to study with any kind of predictability or organizing qualities, and therefore should be avoided (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, pp. 12-16). This major conceptual shift would raise many more questions than it answered and would call for fundamental changes in defining many of the terms central to information needs research, like information and need. Dervin and Nilan outlined several studies that had already been done that employed at least some of the proposed changes in research direction and some new approaches that had already been advanced in the literature, including the User-Values approach, the Sense-Making Approach, and the Anomalous States-of-Knowledge Approach (Dervin and Nilan, 1986, pp. 18-24).

The Ripple Effect
After the 1986 ARIST review, the information behavior field exploded with new, qualitative research and theoretical leaps that advanced the field immeasurably. The assertions made by Dervin, Jacobson, and Nilan in 1982 would be applied to a new, qualitatively grounded theory of “library anxiety” and its effects on the research habits of students in the 1986 article “Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development” by Constance Mellon, published in College and Research Libraries. In it, Mellon explicates the reasons for her qualitative research and illustrates the ways that qualitative data can be analyzed effectively for broader applicability (Mellon, 1986, p. 161). Another example of their influence came in 1992, when Brent D. Ruben published “The Communication-Information Relationship in System-Theoretic Perspective” in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, in which he illustrated the complicated interrelationships between the terms communication and information and showed some of the many ways that they are used in the communication and information sciences. He solidified his link to user-oriented work when, in explicating his theoretical focus, he stated that “it is suggested that…the focii of communication theory are the construction of meaning, and the nature of human message (or information) related behavior…[f]or information studies, comparable emphasis is typically placed on the transmission of information” (Ruben, 1992, p. 17) and posited that there is a corresponding emphasis placed on the user perspective in both communication and information studies (Ruben, 1992). Ruben defined communication as an “interactive process involving the transformation of information” and used a modified version of Dervin’s model from the California study to illustrate this (Ruben, 1992, p. 22).
Carol C. Kuhlthau is another theorist and researcher who drew heavily on Dervin’s work. In her 1991 article “Inside the Search Process: Information Seeking from the User’s Perspective,” Kuhlthau lifted her justification for her “new approach” directly from Dervin and Nilan’s 1986 review and “describes the information search process from the user’s perspective as revealed in a series of studies” and defined the information search process, or ISP, as “the user’s constructive activity of finding meaning from information in order to extend his or her state of knowledge on a particular problem or topic,” (Kulthau, 1991, p. 361) a far cry from the old objective, quantifiable assumption of the nature of information. In this study, Kulthau draws heavily on the work of Taylor in that he places “the user’s cognitive process in the forefront of considerations of information provision (Taylor 1963, 1986)” (Kulthau, 1991, p. 363). Kulthau’s studies on high school students facing research paper assignments used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to assess their ISP’s; the affective findings of these studies would eventually lead to her work on an uncertainty principle, a theory fully explicated in her article “A Principle of Uncertainty for Information Seeking,” published in the Journal of Documentation in 1993.
Kulthau’s principle of uncertainty relies on the new assumptions posited by Dervin (1976) and then the paradigm shift called for in Dervin and Nilan (1986) calling “for research within a new paradigm of the user’s perspective in order to provide a solid research base on which to build a conceptual framework for both practice and research” (Kulthau, 1993, p. 340) in her words. This principle uses a constructivist framework in the spirit of Dewey and Kelly’s work, from which she creates a model of the information search process as arising in a state of uncertainty (Kulthau, 1993, p. 343). She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods for her studies because “[q]ualitative and quantitative methods complement each other by offering two ways of looking at a problem. Qualitative methods offer an internal view, which addresses the why of an issue, bringing insight to more quantitative findings” (Kulthau, 1993, pp. 344-5). Throughout her studies, she relies on the idea that “[i]nformation seeking is a process of seeking meaning, not just finding and reproducing information,” (Kulthau, 2005, p. 232) again echoing Dervin.
This work would carry into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with newer theorists and researchers like Reijo Savolainen, Pertti Vakkari, Dale E. Brashers, and Robert F. Carey, Lynne E. F. McKechnie, ad Pamela J. McKenzie. Savolainen’s work in the early nineties in analyzing Sense-Making theory would lead to the development of “a framework for the study of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) in the context of way of and mastery of life” (Savolainen, 1995, p. 259). In the 1995 article in Library and Information Science Research, Savolainen proposes a complex model of information seeking behaviors in which the “selection of information sources and channels” and the “seeking of orienting and practical information” (Savolainen, 1995, p. 268)—the only places where traditional information systems might be involved—play only a small part. In 1999, Vakkari tackled Information Retrieval (IR) systems from a non-system oriented perspective and “pay[s] attention to the user’s way of conceptualizing search activities” in order to better understand the problem solving capabilities of IR systems (Vakkari, 1999, p. 821). Vakkari stressed the importance of understanding the cognitive point of view and prior knowledge when examining human interaction with and the problem solving utilization of IR systems (Vakkari, 1999). Brashers carries Kulthau’s work forward with his ideas about the nature of uncertainty and its role in communication interactions (Brashers, 2001). He qualitatively examined such complex human behaviors as emotional responses when assessing their role in the communication transaction, and addressed how emotions affect information-seeking behavior in general (Brashers, 2001). Carey, McKechnie, and McKenzie would build on Dervin (1976, 1984, 1986) and Savolainen’s (1995) work when they first conducted studies in the spirit of and later reflected on the difficulties of observing everyday life information seeking with any degree of accuracy (Carey, McKechnie, and McKenzie, 2001).

Case’s Presentation
Case’s work comes to us after the major revolution of user orientation in library research. He begins the book with case studies of actual human information seeking situations, and does not suggest even the idea that we might begin to approach information behavior studies from the system perspective. In Chapter 4, he introduced us to the scholarly work of Taylor, Belkin, Dervin, and Kulthau by providing overviews without which the author would have had no framework for understanding even part of the literature reviewed in constructing a partial overview of the work surrounding the sense-making revolution and the work of Brenda Dervin. He began the chapter by attempting to define “need” and moves from there to contrast “need” with “demand” (Case, 2007, p. 70-1). It is from this base that the work of the major theorists in the field was addressed.
When he examined the landmark 1968 Robert Taylor article, Case explicitly stated that it deals with “how and why people come to ask questions at reference desks” (Case, 2007, p. 72), immediately drawing a parallel with possible current professional experience for students. Case went on to digest the stages of question formulation outlined by Taylor, and he even created a model of Taylor’s cognitive and communicative chain (Case, 2007, p. 72). He drew an explanatory library analogy for students before moving on to Belkin’s work on ASK and uncertainty. Next came his outline of Dervin’s Sense-Making work, which is characterized as “the most ambitious attempt to explain the origins of information needs” (Case, 2007, p. 75).
Nearly all of the sources reviewed in this paper on the origins of sense-making and the surrounding literature were either specifically cited by Case in conjunction with his explanations of information behavior theory and research or are related works by authors cited by Case. Case’s initial presentation and overview provide an excellent and comprehensive starting point for primary source research. His perspective as a theorist and textbook creator is helpful in giving beginning researchers an idea of areas of possible interest especially with respect to applicability in one’s chosen professional focus; Case’s review of sense-making made more sense than any other theory, as far as its practicality, to the current examiner.

Reaction to Case
Reviews of the First Edition
The professional reviews of Looking for Information that were gathered were all for the first edition of the book; however, after reading them, it is clear that the basic structure of the book was predictably unchanged from the first to the second editions. The reviewers universally applaud Case for his ambition and thoroughness in the literature that he references in the work, and they note that the narrowed focus of his work on work done primarily post-1980 is appropriate in that information seeking literature written before this time has been rendered mostly obsolete. T. P. Hogan stated his belief that the book is not only useful to Case’s intended audience of graduate students and established researchers, but also to “other professionals and students as well, including librarians who wish to better understand their clientele, and undergraduates majoring in a number of fields…” (Hogan, 2003). Kevin Mulroy’s review pointed out Case’s characterization of his book as the first “single current and comprehensive text that reflected the full breadth of research on information behavior,” and states that “[t]his work successfully fills that gap” (Mulroy, 2003). The final review examined was Nancy Mulvaney’s in The Indexer, in reaction to the book being named the American Society of Information Science and Technology’s 2003 Best Information Science Book Award winner. This review was more cursory than the other two, mostly outlining the various sections of the book and highlighting the sections that the reviewer found interesting and obviously constructed from a non-information professional point of view.
Both Hogan and Mulroy noted Case’s focus on Dervin and sense-making work as important to the field. Hogan noticed that “Case treats Brenda Dervin’s work of the 1970’s as the turning point for the field, and he discussed the sense-making paradigm frequently in later chapters” (Hogan, 2003). Hogan also indirectly highlighted the change in research focus brought about by Dervin’s work when he noted that “[t]he focus on the person or ‘information seeker’ in these chapters and in the concluding remarks of chapter thirteen illustrate the scope, evolution, and dynamic nature of information seeking research, as well as its potential for impact” (Hogan, 2003). Mulroy addressed the focus on sense-making when he highlighted the “significant…rise of the ‘sense-making’ paradigm, which gives more attention to context and meaning. Investigators now are studying aspects of time, space, and situation that influence the ways people create, perceive, ignore, seek, and use information” (Mulroy, 2003).

Personal Reaction
The aspect of the organization of the Case text that struck me most was the way that it was constructed to ease the novice library and information science student into the most relevant terms, concepts, theories, theorists, and paradigms. From almost the first reading assignment, though, the focus on the user as central to research and theory was a very attractive facet of the presentation of the material. When the sense-making theory was gradually introduced, it made more sense than any theory that I had yet read that would explain why libraries are used and why people would go to the enormous effort of seeking information through such a formal source. As stated earlier, Dervin’s ten flawed assumptions were addressed very early on in the book, and were re-examined at the end of the text in light of the work done since then, and my personal interest in the nature of reality and how human beings construct it for themselves was piqued. Before it was even suggested to be a major controversy within the field, I found myself questioning how all of this research presumed to be quantitative when it was dealing with human beings; I almost immediately saw that a false dichotomy had been drawn between qualitative/quantitative research about human behavior and how it could be addressed in information behavior research. The realistic way that Case grapples with defining even information, the central term of the book, in light of human behavior, among the myriad other difficult and primitive terms that we associate with our cognitive processes was and is an endlessly fascinating debate.
When I chose my theoretical perspective for analysis, I had never encountered primary sources in this field. This provided quite the educational experience, but it proved to be one that was enjoyably informative and enlightening. After even my very limited review of some of the literature surrounding sense-making and the inextricably linked user-orientation of information behavior research, I am grateful for the base that was provided by Case for examining the literature. Case does a better job of distilling and explaining the importance of much of the theory than the authors themselves do, and this is partially due to the removed perspective that he has. Now, however, I know much more about what is out there to inform me professionally, and, after gaining some basis for comparison, I know that Looking for Information will remain a vital part of my professional collection.
Conclusion
After an individual review of some of the primary texts associated with sense-making work, Case’s use of user-orientation and sense-making as a lens through which to examine information behavior research and theory was shown to be a useful and applicable one for providing a practical basis for further library science study. Primary texts can be daunting to wade through, and Case’s distillation of the important concepts and definition of the key terms associated with the current important theory not only promotes use of the literature by de-mystifying it, but also serves as a guide for deeper learning about subjects of interest for even novice students. This project has been an interesting foray into the ways that secondary texts re-interpret and explain primary work, and this has illustrated the usefulness of the perspective of time and focus for better communicating the practical meaning of theory that is often obscured from the inexperienced scholar.

References

Artandi, S. (1973). Information concepts and their utility. Journal of the American Society for Belkin, N.J. (1978). Information concepts for information science. Journal of Documentation, Belkin, N.J. (2005). Anomalous state of knowledge. In K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez & E. E. Belkin, N.J., Oddy, R., & Brooks, H. (1982). ASK for information retrieval. Journal of Brashers, D. E. (2001). Communication and uncertainty management. Journal of Carey, R., McKechnie, L. E. F., & McKenzie, P. J. (2001). Gaining access to everyday life Case, D. O. (2007). Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Dervin, B. (1976a). Strategies for dealing with human information needs: Information or Dervin, B. (1976b). The everyday information needs of the average citizen: A taxonomy for Dervin, B. (1983). Information as a user construct: The relevance of perceived information Dervin, B. (2005). What methodology does to theory: Sense-making methodology as exemplar. Dervin, B., Ellyson, S., Hawkes, G., Guagnano, G., & White, N. (1984). Information needs of Dervin, B., Jacobson, T., & Nilan, M. (1982). Measuring aspects of information seeking: A test Dervin, B., & Nilan, M. (1986). Information needs and uses. In M. Williams (Ed.), Dewey, J. (1910). The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought. How we think. Lexington, Mass: Dewey, J. (1925). Nature, Communication, and Meaning. Experience and Nature. Chicago, IL: Heap, J. (1975). What are sense making practices? Sociological Inquiry, 46, 107-115.
Ruben, B. D. (1992). The communication-information relationship in system-theoretic Savolainen, R. (1993). The sense-making theory: Reviewing the interests of a user-centered Savolainen, R. (1995). Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in Taylor, R. S. (1968). Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries. College and Tidline, T. J. (2005). Dervin’s sense-making. In K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez, & E. F. McKechnie Vakkari, P. (1999). Task complexity, problem structure and information actions. Integrating Wilson, T. D. (1984). The cognitive approach to information seeking behavior and information Information Science, 24(4), 42-245.
34, 55-85.
McKechnie (Eds.). Theories of information behavior (pp. 44-48). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Documentation, 38(2), 61-71.
Communication, 51, 456-476.
information seeking. Library and Information Science Research, 23, 319-334.
Needs, and Behavior, 2nd. Ed. San Diego: Academic Press.
communication? Journal of Broadcasting, 20(3), 324-351.
analysis. In M. Kochen & J. Donahue (Eds.), Information for the community (pp. 23-35). Chicago: American Library Association.
needs to synthesis and interpretation. In S. A. Ward & T. J. Reed (Eds.), Knowledge structure and use: Implications for synthesis and interpretation (pp. 153-184). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
In K. E. Fisher, S. Erdelez & E. F. McKechnie (Eds.), Theories of information behavior (pp. 25-30). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
California—1984. Davis, CA: Institute of Governmental Affairs, University of California, Davis.
of a quantitative/ qualitative methodology. In M. Burgoon (Ed.), Communication Yearbook (Vol. 6, pp. 419-445). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (Vol. 21, pp. 1-25). White Plains, NY: Knowledge Industry.
D.C. Heath. 68-78. Reproduced in The Mead Project. Ed. Dr. L. G. Ward. Accessed November 10, 2007.
Open Court Publishing Company. In The Essential Dewey (Vol. 2, pp. 50-66). Eds. L. Hickman and T. Alexander. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
/> < http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/158>
perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42, 361-371.
Documentation, 49, 339-355.
E. F. McKechnie (Eds.), Theories of information behavior (pp. 230-234). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Research Libraries, 47, 160-165.
/> perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43, 15-27.
approach to information seeking and use. Information Processing and Management, 29, 13-28.
the context of “way of life”. Library and Information Science Research, 17, 259-294.
research Libraries, 29, 178-194.
(Eds.), Theories of information behavior (pp. 113-117). Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
studies on information seeking and retrieval. Information Processing and Management, 35, 819-837.
use. Social Science Information Studies, 4, 197-204.

Related Posts

Critical Making Lab

Sarte

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Meaning from Chaos: Gleick’s The Information