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

  • Authors:

  • Yunjie (Calvin) Xu;Cheng Yian (Bernard) Tan;Li Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Systems, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117543.;Department of Information Systems, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117543.;Department of Information Systems, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117543.

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

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. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.