Abstract:

“Small world theories” developed by Elfreda Chatman were consist of a series of theories, including theory of information poverty, theory of life in the round, and theory of normative behavior. Chatman explained information poverty from “small world life” perspective. She indicated that information poverty was not necessarily correlated to economical poverty. It was the “insider” and “outsider” structure and social norms of small world that erected barriers against the information seeking and sharing. Chatman further deeply discussed the conceptions of “social norm”, “small world” and “information behavior” in her theory of life in the round and theory of normative behavior. By doing this, she expanded the application of her theory from extremely poor and socially isolated groups to less contextrestricted groups. Chatman’s small world theory borrowed several concepts and theories from Sociology. Moreover, she did lots of empirical studies to induce and test her theories with ethnographic research methods. Traditionally, research in human information behavior was mainly embedded in cognitive and psychological perspectives. Studies of Chatman greatly changed such academic tradition and created a new sociological paradigm in human information behavior.

Key words: Information poverty, Small world theory, Elfreda chatman, Human information behavior