Interest matters? The relationships between interest and common interactive information retrieval experiment measures
Limor Tamim · cIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2020
This study explores the relationships between the level of interest in an assigned search task and the retrieved content and measures commonly used in interactive information retrieval research. First, measures that are commonly used in IIR experiments were identified by reviewing IIR literature, then an experiment was conducted where participants were asked to complete two search tasks, one more interesting to them and one less so, and the differences in their behavior and perceptions were measured to determine if there is a significant difference between the two tasks for each of the measures identified. The results are inconclusive regarding the influence of interest. The possible reasoning for such results is discussed, and recommendations for designing future experiments are given.