Sense-making Studies

Researchers have used SMM to investigate the problems of diverse populations of varied sample sizes, diverse ethnic cultures, and unique contexts. The results of these studies have extended the usage and interpretation of Dervin’s work. In Valerie Smith’s (2008) dissertation, the decision to use gender (women) and culture (Afghani) as variables to investigate participants’ information- seeking behaviors exemplifies SMM’s adaptability to capture diverse constructs. The study was situated on the premise that Afghani culture places restrictions on women’s interactions with the world by having them passively seek assistance through men. However, the Afghani refugees in the study were women living in the United States without men and therefore, were responsible for their own solutions for survival.

Methodologically, Smith (2008) identified a limitation in utilizing SMM in relation to non-Western people:

Effectively implementing the Sense-Making Methodology with people from non-Western backgrounds required adapting the assumptions of sense-making that individuals want to control their environment and that they ask questions to do so. If people, whether Western or non-Western, have not been authorized to be assertive or if they hold other values as more important, such as group harmony, this information seeking approach may not come naturally to them (Smith, 2008, p. 307).

Smith’s (2008) assumption specifically taps into the possibility of value systems (cultural and religion) influencing people’s approach to solving problems in their lives. However, this assumes that people are in systems (such as governing and culture) that are contrary to their own personal value systems.

Howard Rodriguez-Mori’s (2009) study on the information behavior of Puerto Rican migrants focused on capturing the assimilation process. Participants in the study were not immigrants or refugees (such as in the case of Smith’s (2008) study) but rather migrants coming from Puerto Rico to the mainland of the United States for the first time to live. Using a form of Dervin’s Micro-Moment Time-Line Interview Method, Rodriguez-Mori (2009) conducted interviews in Spanish. Rodriguez-Mori’s (2009) study focused on the process of migration in an assimilation context. Though assimilation is not clearly defined in his study, it appears to be used as a synonym for acclimation to an environment, as shown by this finding of the study:

[P]articipants’ accounts, after they settled in the new community there was a time when they eventually took off on their own, either by driving or walking around, to explore the area ... Having experienced the migration process myself, in retrospect I had partly come to expect all of the other information behaviors found in this study. However, this sense- making/information seeking behavior arose unexpectedly out of the data as an agreeable surprise; I had in fact done the very same thing many years ago, but I had forgotten about it. I conclude that this sense-making strategy/information pattern is a regular occurrence in the assimilation process (Rodriguez-Mori, 2009, p. 77).

The description of the phenomena (assimilation process) investigated in this study is similar to Smith’s (2008) study, in that, the process of learning to live in a new cultural environment is used to detect information behavior.

Methodologically, Smith’s (2008) and Rodriguez-Mori’s (2009) studies raise some questions regarding methodological and procedural methods used in interviewing participants who do not have fluency in the language of their country of residence. In the case of Smith (2008), an interpreter interviewed a refugee (Afghani) population, while in Rodriguez-Mori’s study (2009) the shared native language (Spanish) of the researcher and participants was used during interviews. The semantics of language in the data collection process of qualitative sense- making interviews has not been adequately addressed, and as a result, further investigation into the influence of language on data collection is needed.

Laura Brendon’s (2003) sense-making study on the information-seeking behavior of women uses gender as the unit of analysis and utilizes feminist theories in her treatment of variables, such as race, ethnic culture, or linguistic perspective. Brendon (2003) cites feminist theorist Donna Haraway when deciding to focus on gender as a unit of analysis. Brendon (2003) found that participants constructed perspectives toward understanding life based upon such personal characteristics as educational attainment, native language, socio-economic status, and marital status (p.118). She (2003) concludes that “further studies would benefit from working with participants who were more similar” (p. 118), suggesting a perspective beyond gender. Referencing Brendon’s (2003) investigation into the information behavior of women as an example of a sense-making study provides support for the idea that participants should be grouped based upon very specific characteristics. This approach should result in a study that identifies the information behavior of specific populations.

Smith’s (2008) argument to the question of whether culture or gender influences the use of the SMM is contrasted by the example of Daniel Roland’s (2008) dissertation, “Interpreting Scripture in Contemporary Times: A Study of a Clergy Member's Sense-Making Behavior in

Preparing the Sunday Sermon.” The only participant in this study was a Caucasian, middle-aged American male Lutheran minister from the Midwest.

Roland (2008) makes no mention of how the race or ethnic culture of the Study’s informant related to limitations. However, he does state that:

Additional research may help to identify different and/or additional contextual factors for clergy members of other denominations and backgrounds that affect the verbing process in sermon preparation. The obvious contextual differences with the informant of the current research project would be education and theological position, but other contextual considerations include gender, age, and years of experience (Roland, 2008, p. 113).

Roland (2008) did not identify race or ethnic culture as variables in his investigation. However, his reasoning could have resulted from the participant self-identifying with the German heritage of the Lutheran Church (p. 227). Therefore, no issues of conflict between SMM and the participant’s approach to solving problems were detectable. This study agrees with Smith’s (2008) argument that a direct application of SMM within a Western cultural context is conducive.

SMM, has been used to facilitate the detection of people’s information behavior in which has allowed researchers to have a deeper understanding of how people use and do not use information. The studies discussed in this section highlight a number of areas requiring further investigation in relation to information-behavior as well as the use of Dervin’s SMM. Further investigation is needed into new applications of SMM to study the information-behavior of specific cultural groups beyond a Western cultural context. Additionally, further investigation into qualitative interview methods with participant populations that do not share the same

language as the investigator, or the language that the research study is being conducted, in would further the development of qualitative interview methods.