Persuasion, Relevance, and Search Task

Research Question What is the relationship between involvement and information flow control AND task performance, attitudes towards site and information seeking behavior?

Purpose Develop a better theoretical understanding of search behavior based on individual differences.

Lit. Rev.: Browsing vs. Searching Bodoff describes a model of relevance judgments based on information-seeking strategy and reports a study to answer two questions raised by the model. (Bodoff, 2006) Kim and Allen (2002) In vestigated the effect of individual differences and search task on search activities and task performance Marchionini presents a survey of the literature on information- seeking behavior. He identifies factors in information-seeking that include the information seeker, task, search system, domain, setting, and outcomes. Olsten and Chi argue that searching and browsing are both incomplete information-seeking techniques each with their own advantages and disadvantages and suggest the idea of ScentTrails to leverage the strengths of both information- seeking strategies.

Lit. Rev.: Information Flow Control and Interactivity Ariely finds that high levels of information-control are beneficial to task performance. (2000) Eveland and Dunwoody looked at learning of news content in print and on the web manipulating control, motivation, elaboration, and medium.

Lit. Rev.: Involvement, Motivation and Persuasion HSM states that perceivers will exert as little cognitive effort as is necessary to sufficiently satisfy their motivational concerns. The dual process model says that if available and appropriate heuristic cues will be used to make judgments over systematic processing to minimize cognitive effort. ELM is based on the assumptions that people are cognitive misers and that people are motivated to elaborate (systematically process) by their desire for accuracy.

Hypothesis Participants in the low involvement condition will be more likely to engage in browsing behaviors than those in the high involvement condition. Participants in the high information control condition will be more likely to engage in browsing behavior than participants in the low information control condition. Low involvement and low information control will elicit poorer attitudes towards the site than the other conditions. Low involvement participants will have lower task performance than participants in the high involvement condition. Participants in the high information control condition will have better task performance than participants in the low information control condition.

Method: Variables: IV Information Flow Control (High/Low) –Conceptualization: Information flow control is control over exposure to information. –Operationalization: The high information flow control condition will provide the participant with non-sequential links within the the page; the low information flow control condition will contain only sequential links. Involvement (High/Low) –Conceptualization: Involvement is the level of personal relevance a task or message has to the participant. –Operationalization: In this study involvement will be manipulated by telling the participants in the high involvement condition that their reviews of the site will be considered for the inclusion of news content.

Method: Variables: DV Task performance –Conceptualization: The success the participant has with the task. –Operationalization: The difference between number of relevant articles the participant bookmarks and the number of irrelevant articles the participant identifies in the alotted time. Attitudes towards site –Conceptualization: The attitudes and feelings that the participant has towards the web site. –Operationalization: This will be measured using a Lykert-type scale questionaire. Information-seeking behavior –Conceptualization: The behaviors that a person engages in to fulfill information needs (defined by the task). –Operationalization: Keyword searches are considered an example of searching behavior; following links is considered browsing behavior. These will be measured by analysis of the server logs.

Method: Variables: Control Familiarity with the internet –Number of hours spend on the internet per week. Education –Highest degree held Age –# of years Task familiarity –How familiar are you with the topic you your instructed to research?

Method: Data Collection Stimulous & Task –Participants will be exposed to a news archive on Asian news and will be tasked to bookmark as many relevant news stories as they can in 20 minutes. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of the conditions in the 2x2 between subjects design. Instruments –Task performance will be measured by the number of relevant articles bookmarked. –Attitudes will be measured using a 7-point Lykert-type scale. –ISB will be measured by the number of keyword searches and the number of links followed. This data will be captured by the computer.

Discussion This research will begin to identify theortically relevant factors relating to information seeking behavior.