An Empirical Study Of Linguistic And Gender Differences In Information Need Levels In Chinese Contexts

Taylor classified information needs into four levels in 1968: visceral,conscious,formalized,and compromised levels.This finding was a pioneer in cognitive-oriented information needs research.However,the subjective rather than intrinsic nature of information needs makes it difficult to quantify them empirically.Ruthven in 2019 innovatively distinguished the conscious level of information needs from the formalized level in terms of linguistic features: the linguistic representations of the conscious level of information needs are more narrative,emotional,and sensitive in nature than the formalized level.The generalizability of the experiment needs to be further verified because of the significant linguistic differences between Chinese and English,and the high degree of similarity between the linguistic differences of the conscious level and the formalized level and the linguistic differences of gender.In this paper,the hypothesis of gender differences between the conscious level and the formalized level of information needs was tested by repeating it in the Chinese context.In this paper,user questions with explicit gender markers from the "Zhihu" online Q&A community were selected as the original data.The data were first coded by hand.The data were first distinguished into consciousness level and formalized level by manual coding as the independent variables for hypothesis testing,and the percentage and skewness of the use of different categories of words were calculated as the main dependent variables by using Text Mind a text analysis software to analyze the linguistic characteristics of the two information needs levels.Gender was then used as the independent variable according to the gender marker for subsequent hypothesis testing.The final conclusions are drawn in three aspects: the theoretical connotation perspective,the empirical research perspective,and the experimental results perspective.From the theoretical connotation perspective,the essence of the hierarchy of information needs theory is a cognitive state that arises from a problem situation and is accompanied by information seeking.The essence of this cognitive state is to think about the problem situation.The essence and connotation of the theory has two implicit assumptions: one is that information needs are absolutely subjective,and the other is that information needs are a reflection of an individual’s internal mental state.From the perspective of theoretical research,the study of information need levels has significant contextual properties,and a wider range of contextual factors including gender differences should be considered in the empirical research.From the perspective of the experimental results,the linguistic expressions of the conscious level of information needs in the Chinese context are more narrative,perceptual and emotional,and contain more positive thinking than the formal level.There was also a significant gender difference between the conscious level and the formal level of information needs,with women being more inclined to express information needs at the conscious level compared to men.