A Preliminary Inquiry into the Methodologies Employed in Research on ICTs and Society: Prologue (“An Alternate View of Knowledge Negotiation”)

Alice Robbin

doi:10.31269/triplec.v8i2.171

Alice Robbin School of Library and Information Service, Indiana University Bloomington

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v8i2.171

Keywords: conduct of research inquiry, methodology, bibliometrics

Abstract

This paper originates in a commitment to write a panel presentation on the methodologies employed in published research on ICTs and society for the 2009 ICTs, Society, and Human Beings conference. The author recognized that this task was not feasible without a rethinking of how to proceed. This paper describes how the author reconceptualized her thinking about how to fulfill her original commitment and offers an example of how we begin to understand what our research question is about.

Author Biography

Alice Robbin, School of Library and Information Service, Indiana University Bloomington

Alice Robbin is an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include information policy, communication, and information behavior in complex organizations and societal implication of the information age. She teaches courses in information policy, social informatics, and organizational informatics. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (minor in Sociology) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She investigates various aspects of information policy design and analysis of the national and international information infrastructure. Her current research investigates information seeking behavior on the Internet and the four-year public review initiated by the U.S. Office of Management Budget to modify policy on the classification of race and ethnicity. She has published articles and book chapters in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Administration & Society, Journal of Government Information, The Information Society, Internet Research, and the Annual Review of Information Science & Technology. For more information, see http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~arobbin/.