Professional Documents
Culture Documents
T. D. WILSON
The results are readily accessible through a number of publications (see Wilson and Streatfield, 1977, 1980, 1981; Streatfield and Wilson, 1980; Wilson et al., 1978). In this chapter, I am concerned with an aspect of the project not previously discussed in detail: the design of our study questionnaire and its employment in the interviews.
The one amendment we made to this definition, in the case of Project INISS, is that the explanatory categories were developed before, during, and after the observation, relying for the precategorization, in part, upon Mintzberg's work. All observed communication events (a change of event being signalled by a change in the subject of communication) were recorded on edge-notched cards (see Figure 1) and, in total, 5,839 such cards were produced for the 22 participants. Manual analysis was performed on the predetermined variables, such as duration of event, location of the event, and channel of communication used. Further definition of events in terms of the activity engaged in while communicating and the subject of the communication was carried out after observation. The categorization of activity was performed using Mintzberg's analysis of managerial behaviour into interpersonal, informational, and decisional roles, slightly expanded by the inclusion of a "social work practitioner" role, a "decision-seeker" role, and a "negotiation-prompter" role, to account for observed non-managerial roles. A simple classification scheme employing two facets, "client or organization focus" and "service focus," was used to categorize the subject of communication events.
Structured observation, therefore, served primarily the purpose of collecting quantitative data. However, it also had an important qualitative significance, in that the observers developed an understanding of the nature of social services work and of the relationships between information channels and information types and the work carried out by different categories of staff in the departments.
This understanding extended to the political, cultural, and interpersonal relationships among individuals and groups of staff in the departments and was of a kind not reducible to statistical analysis, but was of great relevance to the interview phase of the project. The observational experience informed not only the design of the questionnaire but, most importantly, interpersonal relations between interviewers and respondents and organizational relationships between the Project and the departments. For example, interviews were carried out in departments in which observation had been done, and it was obvious, from comments made in passing, that respondents had been influenced in their decision to cooperate by the fact that project staff had established a degree of credibility in the department during the observational phase. Furthermore, having seen the extent of feedback from the research team to the department and to individuals, the managers of departments were prepared to support the project to the extent of sending memoranda to all respondents encouraging cooperation. Given that, at the start of the project, there had been some unwillingness to encourage interviewing and, indeed, a preference for observation, this indicated a very gratifying change of attitude.
Observation had also shown the significance of meetings in social services work, with directorate-level staff spending an average of 16.8 hours a week and line managers 13 hours a week in meetings. As a proportion of the time available in a working week, this could be very demanding: for example, two line managers spent 32% and 33%, respectively, of their working week attending meetings, one social worker 25% of her time, excluding meetings with clients, and a director of social services 70% of his time. As Figure 2 shows, the questions also covered the problems experienced in communicating with the hierarchical levels of the organization. 3. Information use. Figure 3 shows the response sheet used as the lead-in to this set of questions. The categories of information types differed from those usually employed in information science investigations, in that they were based on an analysis of the categories of information used by the subjects observed. Previous information needs studies have mostly used categories of information derived from a librarian's concept of information as journal, monograph, government publication, map, and so forth; that is, the categories were based generally on notions of "form of information."
Frequency of need Information Type 1. Legal, e.g., act of Parliament, DHSS Circular 2. Procedural, e.g., departmental procedure note/manual 3. Names, addresses, telephone numbers, i.e., 'directory information' 4. Training, e.g., courses, information syllabuses, course materials 5. Central Government statistical information, e.g., DHSS statistics 6. Internal statistical information 7. Records relating to clients, foster parents, adopters 8. Internal personnel and/or financial records, e.g., staff lists, budgets Not at all 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Less than Monthly Weekly Daily once a month 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
9. News of developments in social work, including internal 1 changes, whether written or not 10. Research in social work 11. Evaluations of experience or ideas in social work 12. Otherplease specify ______________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ 1 1 1 1 1 1
Observation had shown that various difficulties were experienced in getting various kinds of information and, therefore, follow-up questions sought information on the problems and on access to more general documentary materials. These questions proved useful, as 80% of respondents perceived a daily need for names, addresses and telephone numbers, and as 13% experienced difficulty in getting such information; 53% needed access to client records daily and 21% experienced difficulty in getting access. In other words, two kinds of information of a common nature presented problems for significant minorities of those who needed access. 4. Formal communication systems. In this section, information was sought on the use of various specialized stores and files of information, such as correspondence files, financial records, case record indexes, and departmental or team libraries. The interviews confirmed the experience of observation, that is, that files of information relating to clients and to the availability of foster parents and adopters, as well as "message" books were highly used, whereas the use of team and departmental libraries was more sporadic. Given the nature of social work, this was to be expected.
5. Personal information habits. Observation had shown that social services staff maintained various personal files of information and other information aids, such as diaries and address books. The interview results showed that the most frequently used of these sources was the diary, used daily by 95% of respondents. Address books and notebooks were used daily by 72% and 58%, respectively, of respondents. Again, observation suggested that some personal information files were maintained because of shortcomings in officially provided systems, and 32% of respondents claimed that this was indeed the case. 6. Organizational climate and the structure of the department. Previous work (see Olson, 1977) had suggested that information-seeking behaviour would be related to respondents' perceptions of the "climate" of the organization. Accordingly, a short form of the Litwin and Stringer (1968) climate questionnaire was devised, selecting those items which observation had suggested would be most relevant to information use. Table 1 lists the items selected. However, the only significant relationship was that between climate and work role: fieldwork staff had more negative attitudes towards management than other levels and no relationship was found between climate and any of the information-use variables.
1. The jobs in this Department are clearly defined and logically structured. 2. Our management is not so concerned about formal organization and authority, but concentrates instead on getting the right people together to do the job. 3. Supervision in this department is mainly a matter of setting guidelines for subordinates; they then take responsibility for the job. 4. People in this department don't really trust each other enough. 5. In this department it is sometimes unclear who has the formal authority to make a decision. 6. This department is characterised by a relaxed, easy-going working climate. 7. When I am on a difficult assignment I can usually count on getting assistance from my colleagues. 8. In this department people are encouraged to speak their minds, even if it means disagreeing with their superiors. 9. The policies and structure of the department have been clearly explained. 10. One of the problems in this department is that individuals won't take responsibility. 11. It's hard to get to know people in this department. 12. I feel that I am a member of a well-functioning team. Table 1: Litwin and Stringer items used
7. Experience and training. These were questions covering years of experience in social services departments, in the present job, and professional qualifications. In addition to the direct relationships between observation and questionnaire development noted above, there were two further relationships resulting from observational experience. First, scenarios were prepared for the five work-role categories on the basis of the narrative accounts prepared following the observation. An example of a scenario is shown in Figure
4. These were sent out to respondents prior to the interviews, and respondents were asked to show whether the account was "very close," "close," or "not at all close" to their "information behaviour" in a particular week. They were also asked to modify the accounts to make them more representative of their experience. Analysis of these accounts was rather difficult and time consuming, but enabled the production of accurate portraits of the relevant categories of staff.
SCENARIO (13 Information behaviour and contacts) Social Worker 1) Please tick the appropriate box below: This description is:
Very close
Close
to my normal working week Please modify the account to make it a closer fit by changing various words or figures: James Joyce's main source of information about his work is his supervisor (often during team meetings), but he also obtains information from colleagues in the department (including other social workers) and, to a lesser extent, from external contacts. Mr. Joyce never uses the department library, seldom reads journals (apart from glancing at the department's newsletter) and rarely reads other publications. Files on matters of current importance to Mr. Joyce are usually kept in his office filing cabiner, but most other records are held in the section filing system. He is a member of a department working party and occasionally attends external conferences or courses on professional topics. Figure 4 An example of a scenario
Second, the whole process of design was informed by the team's experience of observation. Individual team members assumed responsibility for particular sections of the questionnaire and prepared draft questions. These were discussed in team meetings in the course of which the researchers played the role of the people they had observed in order to test the propriety, the wording, and the sequencing of questions. The process was quite straightforward: the draft questionnaire was worked through, question by question, while each member of the team tried to respond in terms of the work roles and informationseeking behaviour of the people they had observed. As a consequence, differing perceptions of the meanings of questions emerged, and the influence of differing organizational structures was revealed. In a sense, therefore, the piloting of the questionnaire was done "in house," with the researchers representing respondents. In this way, questions were altered in their wording, resequenced, or dropped from the draft
schedule. The final draft version of the questionnaire was then sent to members of the Project's advisory committee and further changes were made as a consequence. The final version of the questionnaire (by then, its sixth incarnation) was used in an interviewer training session before being used in the field. It may have been preferable to pilot the questionnaire in the field but, given the available resources, this was not possible, and the results obtained using the questionnaire suggest that role-playing on the basis of observation, coupled with informed comment from outside, was a satisfactory alternative. In summary, therefore, the advantages of basing our questionnaire design on observation in the work settings of the respondents were considerable; the observation period was also essential, since without it the relevance of the questions to the respondents would have been problematic.
As might be expected, in spite of careful design and pretesting, difficulties were experienced with some of the questions. Questions that sought generalizations about the frequency of behaviour or specific statements about the amount of time spent in particular activities presented some problems. For example, some respondents were reluctant to specify a particular frequency in answer to the question, "in general, how often do other people in the department ask you for advice or information about these areas'?-" (areas of personal expertise). Also, the question: "can you estimate about what proportion of your time is spent on these activities^" (referring to a response card), caused considerable difficulty, particularly with fieldwork staff, and frequently disrupted the flow of the interview. The main problems with this question seemed to result from difficulty on the part of the respondents in being able to describe a typical week because of the unpredictable nature of client-oriented work, or being able to generalize about the use of time spent in particular activities, possibly because the separate components of work were not usually identified as such. The work-role scenarios for social workers, senior social workers, and specialists also caused problems. For social workers, the different demands of work on long-term care teams and intake teams, as well as demands connected with differences between urban and rural social service problems appeared to be at the root of the difficulties. For specialists, two categories of problems arose: First, the scenarios had been prepared with the work of specialists responsible for advisory work in relation to particular client groups (for example, the blind, the mentally handicapped, and the elderly) in mind. Naturally enough, specialists of a different kind, namely training officers, research officers, and information officers, found the scenario less satisfactory. Second, several advisers who appeared in the sample were concerned with residential services, whereas the observational phase had been concerned with fieldwork services only. Two rather unusual instances of failure to complete response sheets relating to types of information or relevance to the respondents occurred: one respondent was partially sighted and the other chose to breast-feed her child during the interview leaving only one hand free to hold the sheet. In the first case the interviewer read out the categories and recorded the responses; in the second, the interviewer passed the sheets to the respondent in such a way that she did not have to move in accepting them. He then recorded the responses. (The fact that the mother was feeding her child provides unusual evidence of the relaxed manner in which the interview was carried out!) Finally, the items related to organizational climate caused some problems: frequent hesitation was encountered with some statements containing two elements that were not always seen as naturally associated. For example: "The jobs in this Department are clearly defined and logically structured." Also, some of the apparent underlying assumptions, such as that staff should "take responsibility for the job," were challenged, and items that referred to a "team" almost certainly were understood to refer to the local, social-worker team rather than to staff more generally in the department.
These latter points are all the more disturbing when it is recalled that the Litwin-Stringer list is usually employed in self-administered questionnaire studies, without the presence of an interviewer.
CONCLUSIONS
Effective interviewing demands (for details, see Brenner's chapter in Part I): 1. Trained interviewers. 2. A questionnaire designed to meet the research objectives of a study as well as the requirements of the interview situation. 3. Respondents who are cooperative. The observational phase of Project INISS contributed to all of these aspects: 1. The interviewers were able to employ their training effectively in the context of the organizations and staff of the departments that constituted the research setting. 2. The questionnaire was relevant; that is, it enabled the gathering of the perceptions of information use and communication held by the respondents. 3. We obtained the cooperation of respondents, at least in part, because they were acquainted with the team's earlier work in the departments. I do not intend to emphasize that prior observation of a research setting is necessarily the best prerequisite for questionnaire design. Clearly, methods suggested by other authors, such as informal, intensive interviews (see Part II), have their advantages, given that prolonged observation is certainly more expensive and time-consuming than interviewing. However, in a field like information science, where there is relatively little experience of complex, multimethod, social science research, we obtained intimate familiarity with the social life under study, which, in turn, provided an adequate foundation for questionnaire design.
Note
Project on information needs and information services in local authority social services departments ( Wilson, et al., 1978 ).
REFERENCES
Allen, T. J. (1977). Managing the flow of technology. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Bybee, C. R. (1981). Fitting information presentation formats to decision-making. Communication Research, 8, 343-370. Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Havelock, R. C. (1973). Planning for innovation through dissemination and utilization of knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Center for Research on the Utilization of Scientific Knowledge. Hoinville, C., Jowell, R., et al. (1978). Survey research practice. London: Heinemann. Hughes, J. A. (1976). Sociological analysis: methods of discovery. London: Nelson. Litwin, G. H., and Stringer, R. A. (1968) Motivation and organizational climate. Boston: Harvard University Press. Madge, J. (1953). The tools of social science. London: Longmans. Mayntz, R., Holm, K., and Hbner, P. (1969). Introduction to empirical sociology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work. New York: Harper and Row. Moser, C. A., and Kalton, C. (1971). Survey methods in social investigation. London: Heinemann. Olson, E. E. (1977) Organizational factors affecting information flow in industry. Aslib Proceedings, 29, 2-11. Oppenheim, A. N. (1966). Questionnaire design and attitude measurement. London: Heinemann. Price, D. J. de S. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press. Storer, N.W. (ed.) (1973). The sociology of science: theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Streatfield, D. R., and Wilson, T. D. (1980). The vital link: information in social services departments. Sheffield: Community Care and the Joint Unit for Social Services Research. Weinshall, T.D. (ed.) (1979). Managerial communication: concepts, approaches and techniques. London: Academic Press. Wilson, T.D. and Streatfield, D.R. (1977). Information needs in local authority social services departments: an interim report on project INISS. Journal of Documentation, 33, 277-293. Wilson, T. D., and Streatfield, D. R. (1980). You can observe a lot. . .: a study of information use in local authority social services departments. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Department of Information Studies. (Occasional Publications No. 12) [Available at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/] Wilson, T.D. and Streatfield, D. R. (1981) Structured observation in the investigation of information needs. Social Science Information Studies, 1, 173-184. Wilson, T. D., Streatfield, D. R, Mullings, C., Lowndes Smith, V., and Pendleton, B. (1978). Information needs and information services in local authority social services departments (project INISS), final report to the British Library Research
and Development Department on stages I and 2, October 1975-December 1977. London: British Library.