The article by Garrison, business reference librarian and assistant librarian, was published in Reference & User Services Quarterly.
Assistant Librarian Betty Garrison in the Carol Grotnes Belk Library has published an article titled "Data Seeking Behavior of Economics Undergraduate Students: An Exploratory Study" in the journal Reference & User Services Quarterly.
The article was co-authored with Nina Exner, research data librarian and associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences.
The article examines how students begin their search for data, to what degree students experienced problems finding appropriate data, and whether students used library resources or approached a librarian for help. It concludes with suggestions on ways librarians and faculty can collaborate to teach strategic data literacy.
The article’s abstract reads:
This article investigates the information-seeking behavior of undergraduate economics students to determine their effectiveness in locating data sets for a multiple regression analysis assignment and seeks to discover how students pursue the process of learning to find and use data. A study was conducted in fall and spring 2015 to find out (1) what influences affect students’ ways of seeking data sets; and (2) what changes occur over the course of students’ data search. The findings say that while only about 10 percent of students started with the library, either a library database or a librarian, nearly half eventually used the library in some form for this course project. The conclusion reached as a result of the survey was that undergraduates have widely varying data search concepts, that more of the students look for personal interest data than business discipline data, and that the searching part of economics students’ first regression project can add a noticeable amount of time to the assignment before they can even get started working on the regression itself.
Reference & User Services Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal; its purpose is to disseminate information of interest to reference librarians, information specialists, and other professionals involved in user-oriented library services.