Identifying Cultural Variables in Information-Seeking

Information seeking (IS) and use are important user tasks supported by information systems. There is a long tradition of studying user IS behavior in electronic environments, however, the study of the impact of end-user national culture on the use of information systems to find, retrieve, and use information is very limited. This area of research is becoming more and more important as the users of many search systems (e.g., Web search engines, online database systems) access these systems from all over the world and often have to use the same user interface. However, most of the existing research simply reports differences in behavior, without examining cultural variables to identify why these differences occur. A more thorough study of the impact of culture on IS behavior will enable the designers of search systems to design interfaces more usable by users from different cultural backgrounds. In this paper, the authors explore the role of cultural dimensions of the frameworks described by Hall [3] and Hofstede [4] in IS to create a foundation for further studies on the impact of culture on searching. Potential areas of high cultural impact on IS will be identified to propose promising future research directions.