Who will you ask? An empirical study of interpersonal task information seeking

Abstract

Information seeking behavior is an important form of human behavior. Past literature in information science and organizational studies has employed the cost-benefit framework to analyze seekers' information-source choice decision. Conflicting findings have been discovered with regard to the importance of source quality and source accessibility in seekers' choices. With a focus on interpersonal task information seeking, this study proposes a seeker-source-information need framework to understand the source choice decision. In this framework, task importance, as an attribute of information need, is introduced to moderate seekers' cost-benefit calculation. Our empirical study finds that in the context of interpersonal task information seeking, first, the least effort principle might not be adequate in explaining personal source choices; rather, a quality-driven perspective is more adequate, and cost factors are of much less importance. Second, the seeker-source relationship is not significant to source choices. Third, the nature of information need, especially task importance, can modify seekers' source choice decisions.