Page 167 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

166 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

process, we formulated our interview guideline based on the consulting of the theoretical progress
on information behavior and information divide. In January, 2012, we organized five focus groups
interviews, covering fifty residents in four villages and a middle school in Gansu province. In
this step, we mainly focused on the questions such as information agents’ information channels,
information sources and priority of the information seeking practice. We invited reputed people in
local area (such as the president of a local school, et al.) join our interview and introduced us to
interviewees. We arranged a round table meeting in which the interviewers and interviewees could
communicate naturally and cordially.

2.2 In-depth interview

We aim to explore the interviewees’ individual Information World through an in-depth interview
procedure to understand their information source preference. So we conducted a door-to-door
interview procedure. In this step, we asked local teachers or volunteers who lived in this area to
introduce us to each family. Based on the focus group interview and consulting from the existing
research findings, we modified our question list and formulated the final interview guideline.
Fifty-two interviewees were covered by in-depth interview. Within the focus groups and individual
interviews, we recorded all the conversations after we asked for agreement from all interviewees
and got 1 560 minutes-long audio recordings. Besides, we produced videos for some typical
interviews and got 400 minutes videos recording. After the interviews, we made up all recordings
and transform them into text.

2.3 Questionnaire

We borrowed the methodology of Information Source Map procedure (Sonnenwald, 1999;
Sonnenwald & Wildemuth, 2001) and asked interviewees to nominate their information
sources in their daily life. For the purpose of preventing interviewers from getting important
information sources in interviews, we summarized existing information sources which extracted
by researchers from information behavior and digital divide research communities (Agosto
& Hughes-Hassell, 2006; Savolainen & Kari, 2004) and listed these information sources for
interviewees as reference. The subjects included both the interviewees involved into the focus
groups and individual in-depth interviews. Aiming to expand the sample group, we distributed
questionnaires to people in the proximity of the research spots. Through above procedure, 387
questionnaires were distributed and 272 returned. After a data cleaning procedure, we got 202
questionnaires under the quantity analysis finally.