The philosophical and empirical study reported here developed from the
observation that information science has had no comprehensive understanding
of nonuse of information. Without such an understanding, information workers
may use the words "nonuse of information" while referring to very different
phenomena. This lack of understanding makes the job of the information
professional difficult. For example, the model presented here reduces hundreds
of theories of information behavior to a conceptually manageable taxonomy of six
conditions that lead to nonuse of information. The six conditions include: 1)
intrinsic somatic conditions, 2) socio-environmental barriers, 3) authoritarian
controls, 4) threshold knowledge shortfall, 5) attention shortfall, and 6) information filtering. This dissertation explains and provides examples of each
condition.
The study of a novel area that had no prior theory or model required a
novel methodology. Thus, for this study, I adopted the pragmatism formulated by
Charles Sanders Peirce, a method of evaluating concepts by their practical
consequences. This pragmatism applied in two ways to the study of nonuse of
information. First, because nonuse of information is a behavior, pragmatism
helped me to limit the psychologic implications of the study to behavior, rather
than to expand the discussion to psychodynamics or cognition, for example. I
justified this limiting on the basis that behavior reflects the use or nonuse of
information, and behavior is more observable than other aspects of psychology,
such as cognition. Second, Peirce's concept of pragmatism supported another of
his contributions to philosophical inquiry, retroduction, sometimes referred to as
abduction. To study nonuse of information through retroduction, I created a fivestep
"definition heuristic," based on the writings of Spradley and McCurdy. I then
created a nine-step "retroduction heuristic" based on the system of logic
identified and termed "retroductive" or "abductive" by Peirce. I used this heuristic
to identify examples of nonuse of information and applied the examples to a
second corpus of research reports that contained examples of compelled nonuse of information. The taxonomy of this study resulted from this second application
and represents a descriptive model of compelled nonuse of information. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6896 |
| Date | 05 February 2010 |
| Creators | Houston, Ronald David |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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