INFORMATION USE STUDIES PART 2—COMPARISON OF SOME RECENT SURVEYS

Abstract

Information‐use studies are vitally necessary in order to complement, challenge, and sharpen informed intuitive judgements, but even the broadest conclusions drawn from such studies need to be examined critically. The conclusions or their generality may sometimes be invalidated by special conditions in the survey sample, by the environment having been disturbed by the survey, by the interpretation given to questions or observations, or by the way the data has been analysed. These same factors make direct comparison of results from different surveys difficult, and make superficial comparisons misleading. Some comparisons and conclusions are certainly much less sound than the casual reader might suppose, particularly when results have been compressed and taken out of their context in the original survey. The difficulty of comparing information‐use surveys is well illustrated by the copious footnotes used by Menzel, Lieberman, and Dulchin in order to qualify the significance of the results which they compare.