Information‐seeking by parents regarding school choice: An application of the sense‐making approach
Charles M. Naumer · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2005
In recent years, public policies have been proposed and implemented that require individuals to make choices regarding government services and programs. Individual choice is a central component of many of these policies which addresses issues such as social security, public education, public housing, public transit, and welfare. One of the primary arguments for choice based public policies contends that they will create a more competitive “market based” accountability system that will improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of the systems serving citizens. These policies rest on the assumptions that the aggregate of individuals' choices will accurately guide the systems being targeted toward improving performance and that individual's have the information and ability to make good choices. As such, it becomes important to understand how individuals make their choices and how they engage in information seeking behavior to support their choice. In the context of school choice the determination of school quality by parents is particularly important given the increasing number of school systems moving to policies that support school choice. Parents' decisions on where to send their children to school determine which schools remain open and which schools are either closed or reformed. The ways in which parents seek and use information to form a perception of school quality has not been thoroughly researched. (Schneider and Marschall, 2000) What are parents' information needs regarding schools? How do parents seek information regarding schools? How do parents use information regarding schools? Relevant to this study is information science research pertaining to everyday life information seeking behavior. The concept of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) is defined by Savolainen as referring “to the acquisition of various informational (both cognitive and expressive) elements which people employ to orient themselves in daily life or to solve problems not directly connected with the performance of occupational tasks.” (Savolainen, 1995) Everyday life information seeking has also been referred to as non-work information seeking and citizen information seeking. In the 1970's and early 1980's several large scale studies were conducted on citizens' information needs and seeking (Warner, Murray, & Palmour, 1973; Dervin et al., 1976; Chen & Hernon, 1982). These studies primarily identified the most common information sources and channels. Beginning in the 1980's and continuing to today, community information needs have been studied using qualitative research strategies. (Harris & Dewdney, 1994; Chatman, 1996; Pettigrew, 1996; Fisher, Durrance & Hinton, 2004; Fisher, Naumer, et al., 2005) Community information is often broadly defined as information pertaining to human services, such as healthcare, financial assistance, housing, transportation, education, and childcare services. School information in the context discussed in this study is a subset of the larger category of community information. Of particular interest to this study are the findings in the research that citizens rely on informal as well as formal sources of information. (Pettigrew, 1996) Dervin's sense-making approach to studying information behavior is used to guide this study. The sense-making approach refers to a set of theoretically derived methods for studying human sense-making behavior. (Dervin, 1992) The metaphor of situation-gap-help/use is used to explain how an individual might continually move through an experience gaining a new understanding of that situation. This approach seeks to provide a framework for understanding how individuals move between external and internal information to understand their world and how this understanding might affect their actions. (Case, 2002) The sense-making approach has been widely adopted as a way to study how people construct sense of their worlds and is particularly applicable to studying everyday life information seeking by recognizing informal information sources as well as formal information systems. The Micro-Moment Time-Line Interview is a core technique of the sense-making approach and was used to structure the interviews for this study. This technique asks respondents to describe a situation and explain what gaps were faced and how they were bridged. It is especially useful in allowing respondents to create their own context and to explain how they make sense of information in this context. (Dervin, 1984) The research findings of this study suggest that the social exchange of information is a primary method for the framing of issues regarding school choice. Furthermore, the findings indicate that parents rely heavily on the affective aspects of information. These findings suggest that information dissemination approaches by school districts regarding school choice might better incorporate ways in which information might be exchanged socially among parents. They also suggest that the way parents frame the issue of school choice may play a pivotal role in determining their information seeking behavior throughout their decision making process.