The outcome of the Brexit referendum sparked a discussion in the media about ill-informed voters. There are few studies that investigate the information behaviour of voters, and even fewer of referendum voters. This thesis explores a small population of students at Scottish universities to gain insight in how they sought, received, and communicated information before the Brexit referendum. The aim is to investigate the students' information behaviour before they voted. Twenty-two students were interviewed, using a survey interviewing technique that also included open questions. The findings show that students were active, and interested, information seekers, but that they experienced a lack of quality information. Instead of trusting media sources, they turned to friends and family for information, although few changed their mind from their original conviction. The conclusions show that political awareness affected the information behaviour of the students, which is supported by Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample model, and that there was a high level of political awareness among the participants, in part because of the previous Scottish independence referendum. Wilson’s model of information behaviour was applied, and the analysis shows that intervening variables such as environment, role relations, and source characteristics affected information seeking, as well as other intervening variables like the lack of information and distrust of information sources.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-14186 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Broström, Josefin |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Borås, Akademin för bibliotek, information, pedagogik och IT |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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