Students’ information behaviour and the example of the Student Union of Borås

The purpose of this thesis is to show students’ information behaviour in everyday life and towards the Student Union of Borås. Methods of active information seeking and more random information encountering as well as information ignorance are of interest. The study focused on three issues; the first was to examine what information behaviour the students presented while acquiring information in their everyday life. The second was to find out what information behaviour the students had to acquire information from the Student Union of Borås. The third was what barriers prevented information from the Student Union of Borås from reaching the students and how the students would prefer to get information. The theoretical framework was a combination of Tom Wilson’s theories of Information Behaviour, Carol C. Kuhlthau’s model of the Information Search Process, Sanda Erdelez’s concept Information Encountering, Donald O. Case’s study of the concept information avoidance, ignorance and filtering and Michael Buckland’s list of information barriers. With a combination of methods, a questionnaire and qualitative interviews with 8 respondents the study was carried through. The analysis of the empirical material was conducted by comparing the respondents’ statements with the combined theoretical framework. The result of the study shows that the students combined methods of active information seeking, random information encountering and information ignorance in their everyday life as well as towards the Student Union of Borås. The study also shows that the most important part in removing information barriers between the Student Union and the students were to make the Student Union an interesting source of information, and that the students wanted the information in the easiest way possible, on their terms. A well functioning and updated webpage was one of the top priorities identified in this study