A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking Behaviours

Brazier, David; Harvey, Morgan

Abstract

The proliferation of web-based technologies has led most national governments to begin transitioning to a so called “e-service,” where provision is made through purely digital means. Despite their obvious benefits for most users, these on-line systems present barriers of access to certain groups in society. In this study we consider the information behaviour of English as a second language (ESL) and native English speaking participants as they conduct search tasks designed to reflect actual information seeking situations in a UK governmental context. Results show that the ESL users rely more on query assistance, delve deeper into the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and obtain better performance the longer they read documents. This was not the case for the natives, despite spending the most time reading documents. There are some similarities in their information seeking behaviours as both groups submit similar length queries, and are equally proficient in identifying when a failed query did not meet their information need. This proficiency was not reflected in their performance in some tasks, with both groups unable to consistently predict when they had not performed well. The results of this work have potentially profound repercussions for how e-government services are provided and how users are assisted in their use of these.

Citation

Brazier, D., & Harvey, M. (2018, March). A Comparative Study of Native and Non-native Information Seeking Behaviours. Presented at 40th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2018, Grenoble, France

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 40th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2018
• Start Date: Mar 26, 2018
• End Date: Mar 29, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Dec 14, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Mar 1, 2018
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Oct 15, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 15, 2019
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 237-248
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 10772
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743
• Book Title: Advances in Information Retrieval
• ISBN: 9783319769400
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_18
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2169869