Analysing Information Seeking Behavior of College Students in Changing Environment

This research paper investigated the information seeking behavior of college students surveying twelve colleges affiliated to the University of Delhi. Different variable sets were used to analyse the undergraduates’ reading habits, information needs, information search and information use behavior. Total 506 undergraduate students of different disciplines such as sciences, social sciences and humanities were selected as a sample applying multistage and stratified sampling techniques. The study applied SPSS, Version-25 for analysing the various aspects of the study. Results revealed that books were the most preferred source of information among 84.2 percent of the undergraduate students followed by newspapers (64.9 percent) and magazines (43.7 percent) in all the three disciplines. In addition, 34.3 percent undergraduate students were inclined for reading books in more often printed less often electronic format, newspapers (37.3 percent) respondents in both printed and electronic in equal proportion and magazine (52.4 percent) in more often electronic and less often printed format. On the basis of weighted mean, keyword search (206.3 WM) followed by phrase search (159.1 WM) were always used by the students for information search and retrieval. The maximum number of 24.7 percent respondents in humanities, sciences (23.5 percent) and social sciences (23.3 percent) found print resources more reliable than electronic resources