Research On University Students’ Everyday Life Information Seeking Behavior Driven By Different Task Domain

Task-based research has always been a hot topic in the field of information science.Research on information seeking behavior is one of the core research areas of user information behavior.The diversified and the flood of Internet information resources provides an effective way to meet different kinds of information need of Internet users.According to the latest statistical report on the CNNIC,following the browsing of instant messaging and online news consulting,online information search behavior has become the most common and important Internet application of Internet users.The thesis is divided into two stages: including theory construction and empirical research.In the part of theoretical research,through the systematic and comprehensive literature review,the paper summarizes the related research status on the information search behavior,everyday life information search behavior,the impact of tasks on user information search behavior,and the experiment research about user information search behavior,which provides sufficient theoretical basis and reference for the design of the subsequent laboratory experiment research.In the part of empirical research,different procedures like the controlled laboratory experiment,questionnaire survey,observation and semi-structured interview were carryied out to investigate how everyday life information seeking behavior may be influenced by the domains of tasks.Each participant was systematically assigned to four task domains.The whole track of each participant’ information search behavior process were recorded by the Morae Recorder.Their basic statistic information,the subjective perception and cognitive indicators about the tasks were collected by the questionnaire and interview.The method of statistical analysis method and correlation analysis were used to explore the specific characteristics of participants’ everyday life information seeking behavior driven by different task domain,to some extent,which provides a certain reference for the improvement and optimization of information service for relevant online information search system platform.The specific research content includes: The first chapter,the introduction.It mainly introduces the research background and research significance of this paper.The theories value and practice meaning of this research were discussed.Through the literature review,the related research status about the information search behavior,everyday life information search behavior,and the experiment research about user information search behavior were reviewed and concluded respectively.In the overall research framework of the article,the specific research content and research methods of this paper were displayed.The second chapter,the related concepts and theoretical foundations.It introduces the connotation,the mode and the model of user information search behavior,and the internal meaning and connection about the information search tasks.The next part is the experimental design.The recruitment and description of the experimental object,the design of the experimental task,the design of the pre-test questionnaire and the post-test questionnaire,the combing of the experimental process,the interpretation of the experimental tools,the collection and processing of the experimental data were expounded profoundly.The third part is the data analysis and research results.By the manual coding of user experimental data and the questionnaire survey,the researcher analyzed the characteristics of users’ everyday life information search behavior under the four task domains using Morae Manager,Excel,SPSS and other statistical data analysis tools.Based on the theoretical framework and data analysis part,the characteristics of user information search behavior were summarized and discussed,which provides the service optimization suggestion for the online information search platform.In the end,the researcher looks forward to the further research directions of the topic.In this study,we investigated how people do the online web search under different task domains(shopping,travel,general research and consumer health)to identify differences in searching needs.Forty university students were recruited as our experimental subjects and four task domains were designed.In terms of research method,several methods were adopted in this research,including the simulation laboratory experiment,observation method,questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview method.This study focuses on the whole complete process of user information seeking behavior.The characteristics and patterns of the user information seeking behavior driven by different task domains were discussed and analyzed.To some extent,it reflects innovative research work in the area of user information behavior.