Approaches to Socio-Cultural Barriers to Information Seeking

A conceptual analysis derived from the literature on sociocultural barriers to information seeking focuses on the features of such barriers and their impact on information seeking in diverse contexts. A typology is presented that identifies six main types of socio-cultural barriers: barriers due to language problems, barriers related to social stigma and cultural taboo, small-world related barriers, institutional arriers, organizational barriers, and barriers due to the lack of social and economic capital. Socio-cultural barriers are man-made constructs originating from social norms and cultural values. They have mainly an adverse impact on information seeking by restricting access to information sources and giving rise to negative emotions.

1.     Barriers due to language problems

Socio-cultural barriers of this type appear as insufficient proficiency in the dominant language in a country, resulting in the lack of common vocabulary. Most studies reviewing such barriers concentrate on difficulties faced by ethnic and cultural minorities, for example, immigrants (Caidi et al., 2010). A study examining information-seeking behavior among Hispanic migrant farm workers exemplifies well the features of barriers of this kind (Fisher, Marcoux, Miller, Sánchez, & Ramirez Cunningham, 2004). The lack of a common language was a major barrier for immigrant families, because most important documents are written in English and because the cost of hiring an interpreter often outweighs the benefits of their information-seeking behavior (Fisher et al., 2004) factors.

More recently, problems represented the biggest obstacle for ethnic minorities among the Asian residents. When Korean members of the community could not get satisfactory information because of a language barrier, they would assign more weight to other Koreans' experiences than any other indicators. Therefore, barriers due to language problems had a negative impact on information seeking in that they excluded people from novel information sources and compelled them to resort to customary sources available within their linguistic enclave. As shown by Jeong (2004), dependence on ethnolinguistic gatekeepers can limit information that is made available to immigrants, thus resulting in poor information choices. Similar barriers may be faced if immigrant children act as information mediators for their families. Children may acculturate and develop English language skills more quickly than their parents (Chu, 1999). However, as children tend to have less sophisticated information seeking skills than adults, they may fail to provide accurate information for family use.

2.     Barriers related to social stigma and cultural taboo

Barriers of this type can concern people across social strata, independent of their linguistic group. Common to barriers of this kind are the sense of being an outsider, lack of social support, and mistrust of others. People being classified this way carry social stigma. It is a label that associates a person with a set of unwanted characteristics that form a stereotype. A person may be stigmatized on the basis of deviations in personal traits, for example, excessive obesity. In addition, social stigma can result from one's low social status, for example, refugee (Caidi et al., 2010). Cultural taboo can be referred to as strong prohibitions relating to an area of human activity or custom that is sacred or forbidden based on moral judgment and religious beliefs.

So far, barriers of this type have primarily been conceptualized in studies focusing on health information seeking. Veinot (2009) examined barriers faced by a stigmatized group, in this case individuals with HIV/AIDS. The barriers manifested themselves in that the participants disclosed their problems selectively to others, avoided the topic in conversation, and tried to seek information without disclosing their HIV status. Oyserman, Fryberg, and Yoder (2007) found that when individuals from stigmatized groups are placed in medical encounters where they perceive that they are denied access to information because of negative social stereotypes, this may adversely impact their confidence to obtain the information they need, and reduce engagement with seeking health information. Further examples of the barriers related to social stigma can be found in studies reviewing information behavior of people belonging to sexual minorities, for example, gay males. Hamer (2003) showed that among these people the fear of being judged was reflected in the concealment of information-seeking behavior: hiding gay print materials, clearing their family computer's memory so their Internet use could not be tracked, and not disclosing their whereabouts when going to gay enclaves.

3.     Small-world related barriers

Socio-cultural barriers can also appear at the level of local communities whose members orient their behavior according to community-specific norms and cultural values. Drawing on the ideas of Chatman, 1991, Chatman, 1996 and Chatman, 1999, such constraints are referred to as small-world related barriers. Different from constraints related to social stigma and cultural taboo, small-world related barriers are confined to certain local communities that are relatively closed to outsiders. Retirement houses (Chatman, 1992) and prisons (Chatman, 1999) exemplify well small-world communities of this kind.

It is a major characteristic of small-world communities that social norms define the boundary of acceptable and unacceptable behavior; therefore, such norms are also constitutive of the socio-cultural barriers to information seeking. Chatman characterized the origins and features of socio-cultural barriers of this type in a series of ethnographic studies focusing on janitors (Chatman, 1991), elderly women in a retirement house (Chatman, 1992) and female prisoners (Chatman, 1999). These investigations showed that small-world related barriers draw on two main criteria stemming from community-specific norms. First, the criterion of situational relevance erects a barrier by drawing the borderline between the types of useful and useless sources of information. The latter should be avoided because they neither make sense to an individual nor are legitimized by other insiders sharing similar conditions of everyday life.

4.     Institutional barriers

Information seeking can also be hampered by institutional barriers. In general, the term institution is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to particular formal and established organizations of the government and public services. Institutional barriers to information seeking come into existence when organizations such as government offices and libraries consciously or unconsciously prevent individuals from obtaining the information that is needed. Institutional barriers can manifest themselves in excessive bureaucracy (for example, Dervin, 1976). In a study of information seeking among socially and economically disadvantaged people, Hayter (2006) found that bureaucratic complex language hampered information seeking from local authorities. Institutional barriers may also manifest in the form of authoritarian control (Houston & Westbrook, 2013). This refers to any situation in which individuals, agencies, or society at large deliberately or inadvertently restrict an individual's information seeking. Authoritarian control consists of diverse subtypes, for instance, censorship (including restrictive information systems) and bureaucratic inertia. Therefore, institutional barriers can slow down the information-seeking process remarkably and often restrict access to legal and financial information in particular. Harris and Dewdney (1994) (see also Harris et al., 2001) examined the impact of institutional barriers on information seeking among abused women. The women's least helpful experiences were encounters with institutional service providers such as police officials whom they perceived to have a negative attitude toward them or who denied or minimized the severity of the abuse. Such responses may have a chilling effect on help-seeking efforts, exacerbating a woman's sense of isolation, and potentially exposing her to more risk.

Institutional barriers to information seeking can often be traced to the insufficient resources allocated to libraries and archives. The barriers manifest themselves in the unavailability of certain information resources such as printed books and the lack of access to databases. Liew and Ng (2006, p. 66) showed that the lack of relevant materials held in academic libraries was one of the most common barriers encountered by information seekers. Swigon (2011a) found that 41% of the users of a Polish university library had faced barriers related to the lack of materials. Similar constraints were identified by Shenton (2008) in a study reviewing information seeking among high school students. A common barrier was that the material located in the library did not contain the desired content. Information seeking may also be rendered more difficult if information available in a public library is outdated or scattered (Pettigrew, Durrance, & Unruh, 2002, p. 898).

In addition to unavailability of relevant information resources, institutional barriers may manifest themselves in inadequate classification systems used in libraries and archives. Joseph (2010) identified such barriers among the users of electronic document and records management systems (EDMRS). One of the barriers was the lack of meaningful titling of documents or records registered into the EDRMS by colleagues or the Records Section. The negative impacts on information seeking included the waste of time and energy. Nineteen percent of the respondents reported their search was difficult because they eventually realized that the information they spent their time and effort searching for was never registered in the EDRMS in the first place. In the absence of registering these metadata, users' searches were incomplete, thus requiring more time and effort to search for the information using alternative metadata or search methods. Institutional barriers can affect negatively the effort to seek information from human sources, too. Researchers have identified two major consequences of these barriers: failure of access to an information source, and slow down of the information-seeking process. For example, Harris et al. (2001) found that abused women often failed to obtain help because police departments did not have interpreters to respond to calls from non-English-speaking people.

5.     Organizational barriers

Socio-cultural barriers can be organization-specific as well. An organization may be generally understood as the planned, coordinated, and purposeful action of human beings working through collective action to reach a common goal or construct a tangible product. From this perspective, organizational barriers to information seeking primarily hamper the ways in which the employees work and communicate together. Different from institutional obstacles that erect barriers between help seekers or clients and service providers, organizational barriers hamper information seeking among employees within individual organizations such as business enterprises, university departments, and government offices. Researchers have identified a host of organizational barriers appearing in the form of strong hierarchies, internal competition between work teams, lack of trust among colleagues, restricted access to information classified as confidential and narrow specialization of tasks. Organizational barriers may appear, for instance, in the difficulty of getting access to information created by competing teams. In addition, employees may refrain from seeking additional information about the possible consequences of a risky decision in order to avoid conflict within a department or to save the face of the decision maker. Barriers can also appear between organizations in cases in which decision makers ignore or discount external sources of information because of the not-invented-here syndrome, that is, unwillingness to value the work of others (Johnson, 1996).

6.   Barriers due to the lack of social and economic capital

Finally, socio-cultural barriers can appear at the level of an individual person due to the shortage of social and economic capital. Since economic resources are not distributed equally across the population, disadvantaged people are more likely to face economic barriers to information seeking. Although economic barriers could be examined as a separate category, for the sake of simplicity, they will be discussed under the umbrella concept of “lack of social and economic capital” because economy is not an area isolated from society and culture.

Traditionally, barriers of this kind are associated with socially and economically disadvantaged people labeled as “information poor” (Dervin, 1999, p. 744). Since the 1970s, researchers have identified a variety of attributes characteristic of such people. As summarized by Yu (2010,), the information poor tend to engage in a limited variety of information practices in local, confined social settings, which involve limited literacy, numeracy, information, and analytical skills. In the present study, the constraints traditionally associated with information poverty are approached in terms of barriers due to the lack of social and economic capital. Although constraints of this type often intersect with small-world related barriers, the former can be seen as a distinct category because barriers due to the lack of social and economic capital do not necessarily originate from the membership of a norm-bound community which dislikes communication with outsiders.

In general, social capital can be understood “as resources to which individuals have access through their social relationships” (Johnson, 2007, p. 884). From this perspective, poor contact networks restrict one's opportunities to access useful information. According to Houston and Westbrook (2013), lack of social capital occurs when individuals cannot obtain information from another person because of an apparent disparity in social or economic status (SES). This disparity manifests as behavior ranging from shyness to mistrust to fear by the person of inferior SES and behavior ranging from ignoring to condescending to overt attacking by the person of superior SES. C. A. Johnson (2007) demonstrated empirically that the lack of social capital limited the range of information sources available to information seekers, thus relegating them to using sources that were not likely to result in positive outcomes. The empirical study of the information practices among informationally poor people in China provided further support for these findings (Yu, 2010).

Lack of economic capital can appear in the stringency of household budgets making it impossible for an individual to buy computing equipment or pay for access to networked sources (e.g., Chowdhury and Gibb, 2009 and Yu, 2010). Since the 1990s, barriers due to the lack of economic capital have often been discussed in terms of the digital divide, suggesting that unequal access to the Internet erects a barrier to digital information (Salinas, 2008). Williamson, Schauder, and Bow (2000) forecasted that lack of access to the Internet due to lack of income could have social consequences for particular groups of people such as sight impaired citizens. As the Internet has become integral to the way in which people access information, those who cannot afford Internet connections will be doubly disadvantaged. Despite the growing number of people using the Internet for information seeking, there continue to be socio-economic gaps in use of networked information between majority and minority populations, such as lower income African Americans (Warren et al., 2010). Even though people not owning computers may access the Internet in public libraries free of charge, information seeking can be hampered by long wait times and restrictions on maximum time allotted to computer use per person (Connolly & Crosby, 2014). Houston and Westbrook (2013) showed that when abused individuals lack economic resources such as money or bank cards, they cannot buy relief from intimate partner violence in the form of, for example, bus fares or assistance in escape. Lack of economic capital can keep an abused person from visiting a friend or the public library or accessing the Internet, any of which could provide information about escaping abuse. The above examples suggest that economic barriers combined with physical disabilities or spatial barriers can be particularly compelling because they effectively block access to sources of information.

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740818816300330