Data collection for my PhD project is over. Intriguing as it was, it was also hard, and a bit nerve wrecking ;-) Every day securing precious data, looking forward to the next days challenges. Bit of being part of a action movie.

I made use of a interlinked group of expert users of the folksonomy Delicious as participants in a multiple case study. This to investigate my research questions regarding users information seeking behavior, social navigation and connectivity in a folksonomy.
I recruited the participants using the chain referral method. Starting with one participant known to be an expert user, I asked if the participant knew other expert users that he thought would participate in the study. He referred me to two and then the chain went on to fifth link. It was amazing, the positive feedback my project got. Of 16 participants only one participant said no, and that after struggling long and hard with his work schedule.

The 15 participants conducted four search sessions, three triggered by simulated work task situations (see Borlund, 2003) and one search task they brought to the session. The participant’s actions were logged, and after the search sessions the participants were interviewed about their thoughts during the searches and were encuraged to contemplate their connectivity to other users in their network. The log served as stimuli in the interview, and the participants were asked to explain their information seeking behavior as well as their experience with Delicious.

So now I have what seems like very good interview data, log data and social network data to structure, code and comment. Currently I am transcribing interviews, and developing codes to structure it.

More of this later

References

Borlund, Pia (2003)  “The IIR evaluation model: a framework for evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems”Information Research, 8(3), paper no. 152 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper152.html]