Calibrating information users’ views on relevance: A social representations approach

The purpose of this study is to investigate how information users view the concept of relevance and make their judgement(s) on relevant information through the framework of social representations theory. More specifically, this study attempts to address the questions of what users view as the constituent concepts of relevance, what are core and peripheral concepts of relevance, and how these concepts are structured by applying a structural analysis approach of social representations theory. We employ a free word association method for data collection. Two hundred and forty four information users of public and academic libraries responded to questionnaires on their relevance judgement criteria. Collected data were content analysed and assessed using weighted frequency, similarity measure, and core/periphery measurements to identify key elements of relevance and to differentiate core and periphery elements of relevance. Results show that four out of 26 emerged elements (concepts) are core and 22 are periphery elements of the concept of relevance. The findings of this study provide a quantitative measure of weighing various elements of relevance and the internal structure of the concept of relevance from users’ perspectives providing enhancements for search algorithms with quantitative metadata support.