What difficulties did the college students encountered in information seeking during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Kun Huang, Xiaoyu Wang, Shichao Luo, Qiuping Su, Lei Li

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

To better promote information service and fight the infodemic, this paper investigated the difficulties that Chinese college students encountered in information seeking during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected data in two stages. In the first stage in November 2020, we collected data from the Foundation of Information Science course. 54 college students who took the course completed an assignment to illustrate their information needs and difficulties during the pandemic. In the second stage in March 2021, trough convenience sampling we conducted an online survey by WenJuanXing. The participants were required to answer the same question as the question in the first stage. We collected 204 valid responses. Then, based on the search task difficulty reason scheme proposed by Liu et al. (2015) (denoted LKC15), we used content analysis to code the responses to analyze the difficulties that Chinese students encountered. LKC15's difficulty reasons were classified from three aspects: user, task, and user-task interaction. The findings indicated that 14 of the 21 difficulty reasons in LKC15 were identified in this study. Moreover, we added 17 new Difficulty reasons to revise the scheme. The difficulty reasons of user-task interaction were mentioned most frequently. In terms of user-task interaction, the difficulty reasons related to document features were mentioned most frequently, followed by the search results. Finally, it provided some suggestions and discussed the directions for future study.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100005
JournalData and Information Management
Volume6
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • College students
  • COVID-19 pandemic
  • Difficult reason
  • Information seeking

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'What difficulties did the college students encountered in information seeking during the COVID-19 pandemic?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this