Att söka samhällsinformation. En användarundersökning
Citizenship information is defined as the information the citizen needs to be able to take part in and influence the society. Since it is a democratic issue that information concerning the citizens role in society really reaches the citizens, it is of importance to study how the citizens proceed when they have a need for this information. The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how our eight informers proceed when they experience this need in a non-work situation. We performed qualitative interviews. The most important part of our interviews was the introduction of some fictitious problems to the informants. We wanted them to tell us how they thought they would go about to find information revolving the problems. We placed the answers in a model over the human information behaviour. It showed that the informants mostly used the Internet, mass media and personal contacts when they had a need for citizenship information. The problems character, problems concerning simple facts or problems of a more orienting character, was of importance when it comes to how the informants choose to proceed. The more personally involved the informants became, the more an active search they performed. We were interested in whether the public library were used as a source of citizenship information or not, and it was evident that it wasnt.