Informal conversations were held with colleagues and Johanson’s co-researchers to identify what use they had previously made of key informants and how they had themselves served as key informants in research. We examined whether there were similar approaches used in library and information studies, and expanded the research to look at how key informants are used in the discipline more generally. This paper provides a more detailed analysis of the benefits and values of the key informants. The benefits to the research of engaging with key informants (termed expert practitioners in the thesis) were clear to both authors, but there was no reason to analyse their use in detail in the thesis itself, although it was explicitly but briefly described in the method and was part of the ethics approval. The research for this paper started as an analysis of the impact of key informants on the first-named author’s PhD research ( Cossham, 2017a Johanson was one of her supervisors). Consultation with a variety of parties with a peripheral or tangential interest in a serious research topic is a common aspiration for a researcher at the conceptualisation stage of a project.īoth authors have a strong interest in the application and use of research methods and methodologies in library and information studies (e.g., Cossham, 2017a Williamson and Johanson, 2014). The variety of degrees of engagement or collaboration may make it hard to determine what should be included in reportage, and what not. The informality of the relationship between researcher and key informant invites neglect of acknowledgement. It is rarely reflected on in the library and information studies literature and its value is underestimated it may be treated as occurring outside the formal data collection process and not be included in reported analysis. Engagement or collaboration between a researcher and key informants is not often reported in library and information studies and is more usually seen in anthropology and in ethnographic studies ( Tremblay, 1982). They are not usually research participants per se (that is, they are not the subjects of the research they provide information about those subjects) but contribute to expanding a researcher’s understanding and precise insights and help to reduce potential bias. Key informants are knowledgeable individuals who contribute a perspective on a research phenomenon or situation that the researchers themselves lack. It is likely that the contribution of key informants to knowledge creation in this discipline varies from other disciplines. The topic is worth exploring for several reasons: both authors have used key informants in their research and have found them valuable, for many reasons, yet key informants are not clearly identified or defined in library and research methods texts. This paper explores the ways that key informants are used in library and information studies research. There is a noticeable gap in the library and information studies literature about how to best use the inside knowledge and extensive experience of key informants, and lack of explicit elucidation about the potential value which they offer researchers at every stage of projects. Advantages and disadvantages are identified and described systematically.Ĭonclusion. Results.There were many advantages to using key informants in research projects along with other participant groups and sources of data. Analysis involved exegesis of the literature, evidence from the PhD researcher, and analysis of the structured questionnaires. The main benefits and limitations of use of key informants in research were distilled from these sources, and core themes identified.Īnalysis. The data derived from the literature, the PhD project of one of the authors, and discussions by email with five researchers who had used (and been) key informants themselves. This study aims to rectify this lack by identifying the value of key informants, proposing systematisation of their input, and describing their potential research contributions. Library and information studies research has made use of key informants to gather useful background data, but the role of the key informants has been under-acknowledged, under-reported, and under-rated. The benefits and limitations of using key informants in library and information studies research Amanda Cossham and Graeme Johanson Proceedings of RAILS - Research Applications, Information and Library Studies, 2018:įaculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia, 28-30 November 2018.
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