Sarah Fetzer

Dr. Julie Hersberger

LIS 688: Human Information Behavior
20 November 2018

Human Information Behavior Observation Week #4

INTRODUCTION
I have a cousin who is currently applying for a mortgage. As I have never applied for a
mortgage, I was unaware of the long, confusing, and apparently upsetting experience that a
mortgage application can be. According to my cousin, applying to be approved for a mortgage
can sometimes involve hours of working with a lender and a fair amount of blood, sweat, and
tears. This sounded like the perfect place for me to study Human Information Behavior in an
affect-rich environment. So, I made the decision to accompany my cousin to one of her meetings
with her mortgage lender and camp out in the lobby to observe some of the lending company’s
other clients.
Due to the fact that this observation deals with sensitive financial information at a very
small financial institution, a good deal of which I overheard, I have omitted anything that I felt
might be personally identifying at all. In fact, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable including
anything to identify the subjects of my observation beyond their most general characteristics and
actions/behavior. About the financial institution, I will only share that it exists in North Carolina
and that it offers mortgages as its primary product.
During my observations, I was lucky enough to observe six significant instances of HIB.
I have chosen to cover three here for further study as examples of eustress, distress, and a lack of
stress completely. The definitions of these different types of stress will be covered below. For the
following observations and the subsequent analysis, I leaned heavily on the work of Julie
Hersberger in Resilience Theory, Information Behavior and Social Support as well as Helliwell’s
Building Information Bridges Between Parents and Health Care Providers in the Neo Natal
Intensive Care Unit. The text Looking for Information: a Survey of Research on Information
Seeking, Needs, and Behavior was used for reference throughout this experience as it provides
HIB concepts and models as well as a review of previously published relevant literature.
EUSTRESS
A young couple entered the lobby of the mortgage lender and approached the receptionist
desk. Before they were able to speak to the receptionist, they were intercepted by a well-dressed
woman who was clearly a financial professional. She introduced herself as their “future
mortgage loan officer.” The couple was clearly well prepared for what seemed like their first
meeting with the financial professional. They each carried a small portfolio filled with
documents and each had clearly prepared relevant questions. In fact, I could tell that each had
clearly prepared relevant questions because they began asking them well before they had left the
lobby area and entered the office of the mortgage lender. On the spectrum of information
speakers in America as discussed in Horrigan’s How People Approach Facts and Information,
this couple certainly fell well into the willing and eager to learn category. They had all the
hallmarks of eager information seekers from asking questions, gathering information in an
organized and efficient way, and listening intently to an information authority. The couple and
the financial professional proceeded into an office near the back of the building behind a closed
door. I was no longer able to observe them at this point. Though my observations of the
interaction were fairly short, my thoughts on this interaction and the impacts of affect were not.
This couple was clearly experiencing stress, but not distress. They were experiencing
eustress as defined by Julie Hersberger. They were filled with the excitement of taking steps
towards owning a home. There is talk in the literature of affect interfering with a person’s ability
to collect information in a negative way when that state of affect is distress. The standard
example of this is Helliwell’s study of NICU nurses and their interactions with the parents of
sick infants. The distressed parents of the sick infants had, understandably, a much harder time
processing the information provided to them by the nurses. This leaves me with the question of
whether or not being in a state of eustress can impact the way that a person gathers information.
Does the person in a state of eustress make a more willing information recipient? Do they
perhaps miss important details in their anticipation of the big picture? Unfortunately, these things
would be impossible to tell without either further observing the couple, or even better, being able
to survey the couple during their home buying process.
One thing I would have liked to further explore either through surveying or extended
observation is the impact that eustress might have on where information seekers fall on the scale
defined in Horrigan’s How People Approach Facts and Information. I believe that eustress
probably exaggerates a person’s natural place on the spectrum of information seeking. I
hypothesize that those who are naturally “confident” with information would be pushed towards
“eager and willing” by experiencing a greater than normal amount of eustress. Conversely, I also
think those who are naturally “doubtful” of information would be pushed towards “wary” by the
same amount of eustress. If this held to be true, the interesting thing to study would become how
people who naturally fall in the middle of the scale are impacted by eustress.
DISTRESS
A young man in blue jeans and a t-shirt entered the lobby accompanied by two older
people. A loan officer was already waiting in the lobby for him, and I could tell that the loan
officer was tense by his body language. When the young man introduced himself to the loan
officer, he also introduced his two companions as his parents. The young man had with him a
large manila folder full of documents and two large manila envelopes. I knew that he was in the
final stages of his homebuying process because he entered the lobby in the middle of a
conversation with the older man about closing costs on a specific property.
This group was immediately taken into a glass office across the waiting area from me.
While I could hear the majority of the conversation in the office and the tone of that
conversation, the exact details often eluded me. For this reason, this particular observation will
focus primarily on the affect of the individuals involved. What I was able to discern with
certainty was that this young man was in the process of buying a house with a mortgage provided
by this mortgage lender. However, the young man was very distressed because something, the
particulars of which were unclear to me, had gone wrong with the funds he had planned to use
for the down payment on the house.
This group conversation consisted of four members: the young man, an older man, an
older woman, and the financial professional. The young man and the older man were clearly
displaying their distress to the financial professional by raising their voices as they asked
questions in a repetitive manner. They weren’t angry with the financial professional or
accusatory in any way, but they were clearly stressed and emotional. The financial professional
was trying to ameliorate the situation by providing information on possible alternatives to help
the young man with his situation. The older woman was primarily quiet but was furiously taking
notes on all of the information that the financial professional was providing. I could easily see
that she would be the one who came out of this emotional exchange with the most knowledge to
lean on later.
When I was in a place to look back on this interaction, I was able to see a few really
interesting things. First, I was able to see that while giving out information didn’t soothe the
distress of two of the conversation participants, it was exactly what one of the participants
needed. I keep coming back to the study done by Helliwell with NICU nurses and the parents of
their patients. The nurses reported the parents having trouble processing information being given
due their distress at the state of their children. However, I think we’re missing an important piece
of the information puzzle there. While I’m sure that many parents under than amount of distress
would shut down completely to new information, I also know that there has to be a segment of
the population that is looking for any information available. Like the woman in the conversation
who was scribbling down every bit of information for later review, there had to be parents who
were gathering blogs, information-based websites, books, and medical research to help soothe
their distress even if the relief provided was only minor.
ABSENT OF STRESS
A middle aged-man entered the office and approached the reception area. He had not
made an appointment with a specific financial professional but was rather walking in to see if he
could sit down with someone and explain his situation. The receptionist let him know that he
may have to wait because he had not made an appointment in advance for a consultation, but that
she would try to find someone who could talk to him. The man agreed to this and gave the
receptionist some basic information before taking a seat in the lobby to wait. He let the
receptionist know that he was interested in options for refinancing an existing mortgage and that
he had brought his original mortgage paperwork with him.
It turned out the man only had to wait about ten minutes before a young woman emerged
from a back office to meet with the man. She took him to a glass office right next to the waiting
area to meet for a consultation. Unfortunately for him, but luckily for me I was able to hear
pretty much the entire conversation. The man had taken a mortgage eight years ago and had
agreed to a very low rate not realizing that he was agreeing to an adjustable rate mortgage. His
rates had steadily increased over the years until they were well over twice his original rate. He
was looking for a way to stop this rate increase so that he could make progress in paying off his
mortgage.
The financial professional reviewed a variety of refinancing offers with the man. The customer
remained calm and seemed very knowledgeable about the kinds of offers being presented despite
having failed to follow even the most basic of HIB rules and make an appointment with a
consultant at the institution. A lot of the conversation focused on the detail of the loan. Things
that were discussed included amortization dates, lack of payoff penalties, forbearance options,
and fixed rates. The conversation remained devoid of emotion, almost clinically so, and
proceeded with efficiency. The consultation lasted about twenty minutes and ended with the man
setting up a formal appointment with the financial professional.
This was a situation where I expected to observe a great deal of distress on the part of the
man with the adjustable rate mortgage. I know, logically, just how distressing of a financial
situation a mortgage with a rising interest rate can cause. I also know just how distressing it can
be to realize that you aren’t making progress in paying off a loan. Finally, I know that finances
tend to cause stress whether of the eustress or distress variety in most people. Was this person
just immune to the stress of finances? I do not think that this was the case.
Where the small piece of interaction that I observed between the eustress couple and their
financial couple was absolutely bristling with excitement, this interaction was purely business.
This really led me to think about what affect meant in terms of HIB. Was this interaction truly
devoid of affect simply because neither of the parties involved were jumping for joy or crying
tears of deep and abiding sorrow? I do not think that is the case here at all. Surely this man was
not devoid of all stress be it eustress or distress. He was simply not demonstrating distress or
eustress at the time of the interaction. It led me to wonder whether this was a similar dilemma to
the one I ran into when trying to figure out how to study non-users. It’s hard to study something
when that something is indicated by the lack of something else. I cannot effectively design an
observation of information seekers that captures those who aren’t seeking information. I cannot
effectively conduct an observation of affect in those who do not outwardly demonstrate some
form of stress. This is certainly an interesting piece of information to explore in the future.
References
Case, Donald Owen, and Lisa M. Given. Looking for Information: a Survey of Research on
Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior. 4th ed., Emerald, 2016.
Helliwell, Michelle. “Building Information Bridges Between Parents and Health Care Providers
in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.” Canadian Association of Information Science,
2003, pp. 53–67., www.cais-acsi.ca/ojs/index.php/cais/article/view/397/567.
Horrigan, John B. “How Americans Approach Facts and Information.” Pew Research Center:
Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 8 Dec. 2017,
www.pewinternet.org/2017/09/11/how-people-approach-facts-and-information/.