CAIS 2014: Over the Falls without a Theory

The late May evening was warm, and the mist rising from the Niagara Falls was welcome.  The boardwalk was filled with tourists: delighted conversations in a dozen languages, and starry eyed couples walking arm in arm.  My own thoughts turned to the absence of theoretical grounding in new information science research.  Sigh.

I was in town for the 42nd Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science at at Brock University.  CAIS is only one of 75 academic societies that meet during Congress. The Brock News notes that over 8,500 delegates attended Congress, presenting over 10,000 papers at 2,500 events over 8 days. I will share some of my highlights in the next posts.

CAIS is a wonderful gathering of Canadian and International academics and practitioners interested in research around information. This year CAIS partnered with the Librarians' Research Institute, a CARL initiative to encourage and support Librarian's research. There were a wealth of great papers and you can peruse the program.  Several papers/posters/panels stuck with me.  Julien and O'Brien presented a study of trends in Information Science (IS) research.  Positive changes: more research on non-work/school contexts (health, hobbies, home, etc.), and more research in practitioner journals (escaping the Ivory Towers).  Negative findings: surveys/questionnaires remain the dominant research methods, and most research remains ungrounded in theory.

METHODS

"Hello, I am calling on behalf of BMO with a short survey about your recent experience with us..."

After the ten minute tightly scripted survey ("Uh, was five "mostly satisfied" or "generally satisfied") I thought about useful facts about my visit she might have asked but didn't. Oh well, BMO's loss.

Surveys/questionnaires are a very straightforward data collection methods. Easy to collect and analyze.  What's not to like?
But...data collected is only as good as the survey questions asked, and what people say they do, and what they do aren't always the same (gasp!) Using multiple methods allows researchers to consider their questions from different perspectives.  Experimental and observational methods allow researchers to discern between what I say and what I do.  Participant observation lets me walk a mile in the shoes of my participants, and I begin to understand why they do what they do. So many methods...so little time!

THEORY
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Newton, 1676)

Theory matters because I am not smart enough to do it all on my own. Whether I acknowledge it or not I owe an intellectual debt.  Also science is not only about theory building, it is about theory testing.  I reflected on my own research and how well I ground back what I discover.  I am usually comfortable saying, "My research supports X's theory" but less comfortable disagreeing, "who am I to disagree?"  I am a researcher with good data and credible findings. Time to get serious about building knowledge.

Next: Librarians Professional Identities and Collaborative Research

David

Oh, in case you wondered if you dropped your watch while leaning out to take pictures of the Horseshoe Falls, that study was completed in 1955. :-)

Sir Isaac Newton, Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676, as transcribed in Jean-Pierre Maury (1992) Newton: Understanding the Cosmos, New Horizons(Paraphrasing John Salisbury who paraphrased Bernard de Chartres.)
"Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Mushon Zer-Aviv, 2006, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mushon/282287572/