Gender-specific information search behavior
Journal Title: Webology - Year 2010, Vol 7, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical gender study in the context of information science. It discusses an exploratory investigation, which provides empirical data about differences of information seeking activities by female and male students. The research focus was on whether there are gender-specific differences when people perform searches with the aid of general search engines and specialized Deep Web information services. It has been observed how the participants behaved in getting information and how the gender groups differ from each other. Which search system (search engine or professional information supplier) has been preferred by the gender groups at first? How did the gender groups search (applied operators, modifications of query formulations, targeted search)? How far were the users satisfied with their results? For data collection paper-questionnaires have been used and the answers have been statistically analyzed with the help of SPSS. The questionnaire consisted of four different search tasks each with seven sub-questions. The research and the obtained result data indicate at least in the choice of search sources, the satisfaction with this source and the results obtained a gender-specific difference. Men tried to use professional information services as well as search engines for search, regardless of the difficulty of the search task and its formulation. In contrast, women behaved cautiously in choosing search sources. They decided either on sources, which they knew skillfully or where their use was assigned. Women were generally more satisfied with the obtained results as men. These data can represent an initial approach for further analysis of gender-specific Web search behavior.
Authors and Affiliations
Parinaz Maghferat and Wolfgang G. Stock
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP687646
- DOI -
- Views 208
- Downloads 0
Obstacles to the Utilization of Institutional Repositories by Academics in Higher Education in Nigeria
The purpose of this study was to identify the major barriers to the use of institutional repositories by academics in universities of Nigeria with a view to recommending ways of enhancing the utilization of institutional...
Webometric analysis of Nigerian university websites
This paper considers a web space built on a set of the university websites of Africa's most populous nation --Nigeria. The investigation conducted reveals a weak connectivity in the set of official websites of Nigerian u...
Personalization: An emerging direction for tackling the web searching barriers faced by teachers when searching for educational resources
This paper reviews the efficiency of web searching by teachers in the 21st century. The aim of this paper is to highlight web personalization as a perceived solution to the many barriers faced by web users and in particu...
Application of Web 2.0 Tools in Medical Librarianship to Support Medicine 2.0
It is almost a decade that social networking technology along with its tools such as blogs, wikis, slidesharing/videosharing and photosharing softwares, podcasts, RSS feeds, mashups, folksonomies, and bookmarks has dev...
What students are saying on Facebook about their schools?
Social Networking has reached every corner of the mass population in recent years. Academic professionals have employed social networking sites (SNSs) to help them make their teaching more lively and multi-faceted. Resul...