A Model of Social Information Need

Nick Moore, Acumen

The need for social information has six dimensions: function (why do people need information?); form (what kind of information do people need?); clusters (what do people need information about?); agents (who initiates the information activity?); Users (how do needs differ between different groups of people?) and mechanisms (which mechanisms can be used to meet information needs?). These dimensions provide the basis for a model that can be used to analyse social information needs and they ways in which they are met.

Information need is the lack of appropriate information on which to base choices that could lead to benefits or services that may improve people's well-being. (Tester 1992)

Susan Tester's definition is a good starting point for a consideration of what we mean by information need. It emphasises the fact that we seldom want - or need - information for information's sake. Information is a means to an end, something that enables us to make choices that may improve our well-being. But like many fundamental definitions, it does not take us very far.

We play many different roles in our lives and each has an information component. We absorb, for example, a great deal of educational information during our school years. Similarly, at work, people need a steady flow of work-related information to perform the functions allotted to them. Increasingly, however, people need social information - the information that will help them to live their daily lives.

Social information can be thought of as having six different dimensions, each of which can provide a basis for analysis. They are:

Function
Why do people need information?
Form
What kind of information do people need?
Clusters
What do people need information about?
Agents
Who initiates the information activity?
Users
How do needs differ between different groups of people?
Mechanisms
Which mechanisms can be used to meet information needs?

Let us consider each of these dimensions in more detail.

Function - Why do people need information?

People need social information to support them in the two roles they play as members of society - as citizens and consumers (Moore and Steele, 1991).

Information for citizenship

As citizens we are called upon to make democratic choices. To do this we need a considerable amount of information about the world around us, about the choices that are on offer and about the consequences of choosing one course of action in preference to another. The issues are clarified or, more precisely, clearly identified, at critical decision-points like elections or referendums. But there is an underlying expectation that we will all act as informed citizens, gathering, sifting and using information for the collective, as well as our individual benefit. This is a fundamental principle of democratic political systems - if citizens are not well-informed then democratic processes are little more than a sham.

One aspect of this is the need to hold organisations accountable for their actions. Such accountability is only possible if we are well-informed. In some cases, such as the levels of pollution produced by a factory, we are concerned with the effect of organisations on society as a whole. More usually, however, it is a case of an individual ensuring that organisations deal with them equitably.

People need, therefore, access to information that will enable them to play their full part as active citizens, making democratic choices, holding organisation of all kinds to account and exercising their rights and responsibilities as members of society.

Information for consumption

We also need access to information if we are to make informed choices about the goods and services that we consume. This is more than a question of choosing between one brand of margarine and another or selecting the most appropriate mobile telephone package. Increasingly we are required to make choices about the public services that we consume. Partly this is a result of the process of privatisation that transformed many public services into private sector companies. More generally, though, it is a consequence of a more fundamental change in approach to the provision of public services and utilities.

People are now offered much greater choice of schooling, healthcare, housing, social care and other public services in the belief that this element of consumer choice will lead to higher levels of efficiency and quality.

But for the choices to be real, they must be well-informed. Thus we have the publication of school league tables, information about hospital waiting lists and so on, all in an attempt to provide people with the information on which they can base their consumption decisions.

Without access to information of this kind, people lack the power to choose and, through their choices, to influence ways in which society is organised and goods and services are provided.

Form - What kind of information do people need?

We seek, process and absorb many different kinds of information. We gather information from the social environment that we inhabit and, through this, become more or less well-informed. But we also have specific information needs that prompt us to go in search of information.

Environmental scanning

All of us need to build up an understanding of the world we inhabit. We do this through absorbing large amounts of information in fairly random and unconscious ways. This information is then processed and added to what has gone before. Gradually we build up a cognitive map of our world. We recognise people and places. We develop an understanding of principles and procedures - like the fact that in Britain we need to buy a licence in order to own a television. We appreciate quite abstract concepts like loyalty, and justice.

Some of this understanding is the product of formal and non-formal learning, indeed, such learning is often intended to provide a foundation upon which deeper understanding can develop. But most of the understanding comes about through random and unstructured acquisition and processing of information from the environment.

We carry out this environmental scanning all the time by absorbing information from newspapers, from the broadcast media, from family and friends, from overhearing something on the bus - in a wide range of different ways. All the information, once processed, goes towards building up our understanding of the world around us, leading to the ideal position where we are 'well informed' (Ryan and McCloughlan 1999)

As society becomes more complex, it becomes more difficult to keep abreast of all the information that one needs. It becomes easier and easier to miss potentially important areas of information and thus to be unaware of issues that could have a bearing on one's life. The extent to which people are unaware of these issues that are important to them is one measure of their degree of social exclusion. The paradox is that the greater our awareness, the larger is the task of maintaining a state of 'well-informedness'. This seems to bear out the truism that the more information we receive the more we realise how poorly informed we are.

Answers to questions

Environmental scanning ensures that we are aware of what is going on around us and alerts us to the fact that there are issues to be considered and to do this means that we have to acquire specific pieces or sets of information.

At a basic level, people want to have answers to the questions that bother them. They want to be able to find out when they will be able to see the doctor, how they can apply for a welfare benefit, or where they can find a particular piece of equipment. They need to have access to a service that will deal with them as individuals, providing concrete responses to specific queries.

Clearly, the services that provide these answers need to be easily accessible, authoritative, and capable of providing information that meets the particular needs of the individual.

At a more fundamental level, however, people are searching for answers to questions that are more complex or less well-defined. Should we join the European Monetary Union? Would higher expenditure on health services benefit us more than reductions in the level of income tax? Here there is less scope for specific information services and a consequent need for each individual to gather information from different sources, weighing it up and coming to a personal conclusion.

Information alone is not enough

Even when people become aware of an issue or an entitlement, it is apparent that information alone is not enough to trigger action or even, in many cases, to provide an answer to a question. An often-quoted review of research carried out by the Department of Social Security found that a range of attitudinal barriers inhibited people from claiming benefits even though they thought they were entitled to them. The study concluded that we need to

... focus on ways of sharpening perceptions of eligibility rather than just increasing general awareness of the existence of benefits. Other methods of improving understanding, such as the provision of informed advice or the encouragement to claim, should be considered as a way of supplementing publicity. (Craig, 1991)

In some cases, too much information can be a problem. People can feel overwhelmed and unable to make proper sense of all the information they receive. So one of the functions of social information and advice services is to reduce the overall amount of information available, re-presenting and re-packaging it in digestible amounts so that people can absorb the messages and use them to take action of one kind or another.

The experience of the National Disability Information Project showed that what people wanted was to have the information tailored or customised to suit their particular requirements and then for someone to work with them to take action on the information (Moore 1994).

This has led to a general view that, in an ideal world, there would be a continuum of social information provision that ranges from information through to advice and on to advocacy (see, for example, Moore, 1994 and Moore and Steele, 1991). This view is now being challenged by recent research into information about financial services. This suggests that people are becoming more suspicious of financial advisers and do not want to be advised on which course of action to take. Instead, they want an explanation of the options open to them, followed by assistance in exercising the option and, in some circumstances, an advocacy service to help them argues for their entitlements (see, for example, Hedges, 1998, National Consumer Council, 1995 and 1999, Vass, 1997 and Wood, 1999).

This raises the issue of information literacy and the degree to which information users have the necessary skills in reading, comprehension, analysis and interpretation, as well as the skills required to use the information technology.

Clusters - What do people need information about?

Here, we are essentially concerned with the subject matter of social information. It is possible to approach this in a number of different ways.

Hierarchies of need

One approach (suggested by Selina Shah of the RNIB) is to think of hierarchies of need. The most commonly used is that derived by Abraham Maslow (1968). Starting from the most basic needs he defined five different levels:

Physiological needs
Food, water, warmth and protection. These needs are strongest because, if deprived, the person would die.
Safety needs
Felt by adults during periods of social disorganisation and, more frequently, by children.
Love, affection and belongingness needs
The need to escape loneliness and alienation and to give and receive love and affection.
Esteem needs
The need for stable, and firmly-based, high levels of self respect and esteem by others. If these needs are not met, the person feel inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
Self-actualisation needs
The additional benefits that accrue to self-esteem through doing something that the individual feels to be worthwhile. This may be the exercise of a gift like musicianship, or the pursuit of a vocation or a calling.

For each of these levels, it is possible to define clusters of information that people need. The cluster of information associated with welfare benefits and income maintenance, for example, is an important contributor to the satisfaction of physiological needs. Clearly such an hierarchy can throw light on the general structure of social information needs. It can also be used to identify the information needs of specific groups of users.

Life events

Another way of thinking about information needs has been put forward by Susan Tester in her report of the study of the information needs of elderly people (Tester, 1992). She argues that information needs can be associated with major life events such as retirement, moving into residential care or major illness.

Each life event generates needs for new sets of information, high-lighting gaps in our cognitive maps that need to be filled through information-seeking behaviour of one kind or another.

This approach to defining information needs is currently shaping the government's plans for the development of electronic government in general and UK Online in particular (Cabinet Office, 1999).

There are two drawbacks to the life events approach to defining clusters of social information needs. The first lies in the fact that a good number of social information needs fall outside any scheme of life events. The second is the fact that each person approaches a life event differently; they come with different backgrounds and circumstances and trying to account for these becomes difficult.

An alternative approach is to identify families of need. Some needs are self-contained and circumscribed - rather like a single person family unit. The information needed to obtain a passport would be one example: it does not depend on, or link to, any other information need or provision.

Others are more complex. They have added dimensions and relationships but are still quite tightly defined - like a nuclear family. An example of this would be the information needs associated with choosing whether to enter higher education: a simple question that raises several issues and information needs.

Then there are complex, multi-dimensional needs that contain different combinations of relationships, just like an extended family. The information needed to deal with a death is a case in point - so much depends on the status of the deceased that the needs and relationship will differ considerably from on case to another. In these complex, extended families, of social information need, it is almost impossible to define what pieces of information will be needed or to specify how the pieces relate to each other. Instead it is necessary to define the needs by means of algorithms - did the deceased leave a will? If so, do this, if not, do that. And so on. An alternative approach would be to conceive of all the different information needs providing links - perhaps hyperlinks - between them.

The advantage of conceiving of information needs as families is that it becomes possible to start with any particular need, or request for information, and, from that, to work along the family trees to define all the related needs that are associated with it. And from this to build up the links between the different needs.

Thus what may begin as a need to find out how to cope with an unpaid heating bill might lead on to an identification of needs for information about alternative payment mechanisms; information about bank accounts and direct debits; information about entitlements to welfare benefits; information about the charging practices of utility companies; information about energy saving and insulation; information about the rights of tenants, and so on. The important thing to recognise is that the particular family structures will be determined in each case by the individual and their circumstances.

Agents - Who initiates the information activity?

Our model of social information has to take account of three different agents, each of which initiates information activity. First we have the users of information who actively seek the information they require, or simply absorb it from the information that is around them in their environment. Then there are information providers who play a more of less active role in providing information to the users. The third category concerns the intermediaries who process information on behalf of users.

Seekers

We have seen that people both actively seek information and passively absorb it from the environment. The effectiveness of a social information system depends greatly on the ease with which people are able to do this.

Active information seeking depends on both a person's information-handling capability and the efficiency of the information services in the community - a trained information specialist has a greater chance of finding what they need than someone with very few information skills. Someone with access to a good public library and citizens advice bureau is more likely to be able to satisfy their information needs than someone in a rural area visited infrequently by a mobile library. Someone with Internet access may be in a better position still.

Much the same applies to the passive absorption of information. The amount of information that exists in the environment we inhabit determines, to a great extent, the amount we absorb. Someone who travels frequently on the London Underground, for example, will be aware of the latest cinema releases because the films are heavily advertised there.

But personal capability also determines the amount of information absorbed. People with low levels of literacy skill absorb less information than others with high literacy skills because so much of it is presented as text. Similarly, people with visual impairments will not be able to absorb as much as fully sighted people because so much information is presented in visual rather than audio formats.

Providers

Information providers operate in very different ways. Some do little more than place information in the public domain so that it is there for people who want to find it. They do little to promote awareness of the information or to encourage use. Hansard, the record of Parliamentary debate, is a case in point. We know it exists and can go and find it when we need to.

In contrast, other providers work really hard to make sure we are brought face-to-face with the information - or the messages - they want us to absorb. Here one only has to look on the average doormat to see examples of the lengths that advertisers will go to the put us in a position where we read their messages.

In between these two extremes there is a wide range of providers that in more or less active ways try to make their information available to those who need it.

Processors

In most information-intensive societies there is a flourishing group of agencies that process information on behalf of the users. Public libraries collect information from a wide range of sources and make it available for people to consult and to borrow. Newspapers and journals obtain information from press releases and from their own news-gathering activities and re-present this in user-friendly formats.

Others, like the Consumers Association, collect a large amount of information from providers and add value to it by adding their own information or by structuring data in consistent formats so that it is easier to use.

These processing agents perform an important function within the social information system. They are intermediaries between providers and users and much depends on their efficiency and effectiveness. Democracies depend on the existence of a free press and informed consumption is greatly aided by the existence of publications like Which?.

Trust and authority

An important determinant of the impact that is made by providers and processors is the trust that users place in the information they provide. The mis-selling of pensions, for example, has done much to erode the trust that people place in financial advisers. Similarly the Consumers Association refuses to take advertising in its publications as to do so would jeopardise people's perceptions of its impartiality.

Authority is an important determinant of trust. Information users take a number of things into account when assessing the information they receive: the standing of the information provider; the extent to which it can be seen to be objective; its motives in providing the information, and the likelihood that it will get things right. All these amount to the authority that the organisation brings to bear on the information. Thus information about pensions provided by the Financial Services Authority will tend to be given more credence than information provided by a pensions company or an independent financial adviser.

Users - How do needs differ between different groups of people?

Information needs vary considerably from individual to individual. Not only are individuals inherently different, they belong to different social groupings - an individual may, at one and the same time, be a parent, a fluent Spanish speaker, a social worker, a snooker enthusiast and a keen gardener with a liking for Chinese food. Not many other individuals will belong to the same pattern of social groupings and few, therefore, will have the same pattern of information needs.

It is possible, however, to define groups of users that share common information needs. Parents, whether they speak Spanish or not, have many information needs in common with other parents. Equally snooker enthusiasts share information needs whether or not they like Chinese food. The information needs are common but only in respect of the membership of that particular group. Group needs are not mutually exclusive.

When developing a model of social information need, it is possible to define an almost infinite number of groups of users. It is, consequently, difficult to prescribe a standard or general set of user groups that can be applied in a range of different circumstances - so much depends on the point of departure. If one is looking at patterns of provision, for example, geographical groupings might be appropriate, categorising users according to whether they lived in urban or rural areas.

In contrast, for visually impaired people, the key factors that affect the range and nature of needs are: age; the degree of impairment; the elapsed time since the onset of visual impairment; ethnic origin and the incidence of other disabilities. It is also possible to identify significant groups that share common information needs - carers, particularly parents of visually impaired children; professionals dealing with visually impaired people (Moore, 2000).

Mechanisms - Which mechanisms can be used to meet information needs?

A range of different mechanisms can be used to meet people's information needs. They do this by recording and storing information; by copying and reproducing it; by transmitting and communicating it; and by tailoring the information to meet the needs of the individual.

Recording and storage

It is important to be able to fix information and to hold it so that it can be used at a later date or sent to somewhere else. These have been the traditional roles of printed information. By writing something down we record and preserve it so that it can be used by others. It can be printed in multiple copies and distributed widely. The information can be stored in libraries, on shelves or tucked away in drawers.

The chances of information getting lost become remote, although the explosion in the amount of written information means that we now face major problems of managing and storing recorded information. The problem with most recorded information is that it is almost impossible to up-date or to change as needed.

Digital media can be used for recording and storage in the form of discs and CD-ROMs. They thus have many of the attributes of printed information. Networked digital information, in contrast, is not very good for long-term storage but it does offer new opportunities for up-dating.

Copying and reproduction

Information technology and, in particular, the introduction of digital technology, has transformed our ability to copy and reproduce information. In the 1970s and 1980s photocopiers transformed our ability to copy written and printed information but the cost put them out of the reach of most individuals. Cassette recorders, on the other hand, continue to provide a very cheap and effective means of copying sound.

Computer technology has now reached a point of development where it has become possible to copy and reproduce all forms of information that are in digital formats and to do so at a cost that is within reach of a large proportion of households.

We have reached a point where the main constraint on copying and reproduction is a legal one rather than a question of technology.

Transmission and communication

We require mechanisms to transmit and communicate the information from the provider to the user. Some of these mechanisms are long-standing and robust. The newspaper distribution system is a case in point, as is the system of television and radio broadcasting.

It is here, though, that advances in information technology have had the greatest impact. Digital networks now mean that it is possible to communicate information on demand over vast distances at very low cost and without significant time constraints. The Internet, and other digital networks are, therefore, transforming our ability to communicate information.

Tailoring and customisation

Most people want information that is tailored to meet their particular needs - information that is customised to take account of their particular circumstances. This calls for personalised forms of service and a high level of interactivity. A citizens advice bureau, for example, will diagnose a client's problem and will present advice - or explanations - that fit the particular needs of the individual. Solicitors and doctors perform much the same function.

Interactive digital networks provide limited opportunities for interactivity but their capacity to customise information is very poor when compared with a trained information or advice worker.

The model

The model that is set out here is complex and multi-dimensional. In this it reflects the social information system itself. The six different dimensions are related to each other and are, to a great extent, interdependent. The choice of communication mechanism depends, for example, on the information-handling ability of the intended users.

The basic model provides a framework for analysis. It can be used to analyse and to identify the scope and nature of social information needs. Indeed, the model was devised as an analytical framework for a review of the research into the information needs of blind and visually impaired people (Moore, 2000).

The model can also be used as a tool for analysing information provision. The Royal National Institute for the Blind has used it for this purpose as part of a major review of information needs and provision.

References

Note

The model was developed as part of a review of research into the information needs of blind and visually impaired people, commissioned by the Royal National Institute for the Blind and carried out in 1999-2000 to support the development of their New Information Distribution Services. I am grateful to the RNIB for their support, encouragement and cooperation in the preparation of this paper.