Elfreda Annmary Chatman (died January 15, 2002) was an
African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...
researcher, professor, and former
Catholic
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
religious sister.
She was well known for her ethnographic approaches in researching
information seeking
Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Information seeking is related to, but different from, information retrieval (IR).
Compared to information retrieval
T ...
behaviors among understudied or
minority groups
The term 'minority group' has different usages depending on the context. According to its common usage, a minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number o ...
(
poor people,
the elderly, retired women, female inmates, and
janitors
A janitor (American English, Scottish English), also known as a custodian, porter, cleanser, cleaner or caretaker, is a person who cleans and maintains buildings. In some cases, they will also carry out maintenance and security duties. A simil ...
).
Contributions
Dr. Chatman's research contributions or developments resulted in several middle-range theories: Information Poverty, Life in Round, and Normative Behavior. Based on her background in
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
, she introduced her "small worlds" method to studying
information behavior
Information behavior is a field of information science research that seeks to understand the way people search for and use information in various contexts. It can include information seeking and information retrieval, but it also aims to unders ...
.
Life in the Round
This theory draws on Chatman's study of female
prisoner
A prisoner (also known as an inmate or detainee) is a person who is deprived of liberty against their will. This can be by confinement, captivity, or forcible restraint. The term applies particularly to serving a prison sentence in a prison.
...
s at a maximum-security prison in the northeastern United States.
After observing inmates both during and outside their interactions with the prison's professional employees, Chatman observes that the women live "in the round", that is, "within an acceptable degree of approximation and imprecision". Instead of seeking information about the outside world, over which they have no control, prisoners avoid gathering this type of information: in order to survive, they place importance on "daily living patterns, relationships, and issues that come within the prison environment" over which they can exercise agency.
In this way, inmates display defensive
information seeking behavior
Information behavior is a field of information science research that seeks to understand the way people search for and use information in various contexts. It can include information seeking and information retrieval, but it also aims to under ...
.
Inmates form a "small world," a closed community where private opinion gives way to a shared reality and accompanying information-seeking behavior.
Social norms
Social norms are shared standards of acceptable behavior by groups. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws. Social normative influences or soci ...
established by inmates determine the importance or triviality of a piece of information; as such, information that affects prisoners in an immediate way - such as illness while medical staff are off-duty - gain importance, while information on the outside world becomes trivial.
Chatman concludes that life in the round disfavor's information seeking behaviour, as there is no need to search for outside information. Prisoners "are not part of the world... being defined by outsiders";
because inmates do not need additional information to participate fully in their reality, they do not seek it out.
Chatman saw that these disincentives to information seeking could become cultural norms in the small worlds that the people she observed took their norms from, and that these cultural norms could produce what she labeled
information poverty, where a group could perpetuate norms that would cause the avoidance of information that would be useful to people in the group if they were to seek it out.
Biography
Chatman received her B.S. from
Youngstown State University
Youngstown State University (YSU or Youngstown State) is a public university in Youngstown, Ohio. It was founded in 1908 and is the easternmost member of the University System of Ohio.
The university is composed of six undergraduate colleges an ...
, her M.S.L.S. from
Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...
, and her Ph.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. She was also at one point a member of the
Humility Sisters Of Mary based in
Ohio
Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
.
Her 1992 book, ''The Information World of Retired Women'' (
Greenwood Press
Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...
), won the ACRL Best Book Award in 1995. Chatman participated in the
American Library Association
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with 49,727 members a ...
's Library Research Round Table (LRRT) during the 1980s and 1990s, and served as LRRT Chair in 1993-1994.
Chatman was a professor for more than a decade at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...
UNC School of Information and Library Science
The UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) is a professional school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offering a bachelor's degree in information science, master's degrees in library science and information science, ...
, starting in 1983, and a research award there is named for her.
She was teaching at the School of Information Studies at
Florida State University
Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...
at the time of her death on January 15, 2002, at the age of 59.
Legacy
An
Association for Information Science and Technology
The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is a nonprofit membership organization for information professionals that sponsors an annual conference as well as several serial publications, including the ''Journal of the Associ ...
Special Interest Group named a research award for her in 2005.
[ ]
Works
*''The diffusion of information among the working poor.'' Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
The information world of retired women'' New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
*
*
*
*
*
*"Framing social life in theory and research". ''The New Review of Information Behaviour Research.'' 1: 3-17. 2000.
*
*
*
References
Further reading
*American Library Association
"Tribute to Dr. Elfreda A. Chatman" (2002)
*
*Florida State Times
(2002)
*
*González-Teruel, A., & Abad-García, F. (2018). The influence of Elfreda Chatman’s theories: a citation context analysis. Scientometrics, 117(3), 1793–1819. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2915-3
*Pollock, Neil
(2002)
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chatman, Elfreda
2002 deaths
American social scientists
Youngstown State University alumni
Case Western Reserve University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Florida State University faculty
1940s births
African-American librarians
American women librarians
American librarians
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
20th-century American people
American women academics
21st-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women
African-American Catholics