Elfreda Chatman

Elfreda Chatman (1942-2002) was an African-American information science researcher.

Life

Elfreda Annmary Chatman was born in 1942 in Youngstown, Ohio. She became the first African American to join the religious order of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary. In May 1969 she was arrested with twenty-two others after participating in a welfare rights sit-in at the Mahoning County office in Youngstown, Ohio. She also argued for positive images of blackness in the Roman Catholic church (Williams 2022, 189 & 197).

Chatman received her BS from Youngstown State University in 1971 and was a primary school principal. In 1976 she earned an her MS in Library Science at Case Western Reserve University. She completed a PhD in the School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. Her doctoral dissertation, guided by Patrick Wilson was on "The diffusion of information among the working poor." She continued to use her exceptional interpersonal skills to conduct studies on information-related behavior in a series of underprivileged communities: poor people, the elderly, retired women, female inmates, and janitors.

Chatman was a professor at the Louisiana State University School of Library and Information Science from 1984 to 1985, then for over a decade at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was teaching at the School of Information Studies at Florida State University at the time of her death on January 15, 2002, at the age of 59.

Contributions

Chatman's research resulted in several middle-range theories: information poverty, life in the round, and normative behavior. Based on her background in sociology, she developed her "small worlds" method of studying information behavior.

Life in the round

This theory draws on Chatman's study of female prisoners at a maximum-security prison in the northeastern United States. After observing inmates both during and outside of their interactions with the prison's professional employees, Chatman theorizes 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.

Inmates form a "small world," a closed community where private opinion yields to a shared reality its accompanying information-seeking behavior. Social norms 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 about the outside world becomes trivial. Chatman concludes that life in the round disfavors information seeking behavior, as there is no need to search for outside information. Prisoners "are not part of the world [...] being defined by outsiders" and because inmates do not need additional information to participate fully in their own reality, they do not seek it out.

Chatman saw that these disincentives to information seeking could become cultural norms in small worlds, and that these cultural norms could produce what she labeled information poverty, by perpetuating the avoidance of information that would be useful.

Publications

"Field Research: Methodological Themes". Library and Information Science Research 6, no 4 (1984): 425–438.
"Information, Mass Media Use, and the Working Poor." Library and Information Science Research 7, no 2 (1985): 97–113.
"Diffusion Theory: A review and test of a conceptual model in information diffusion." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 37, no 6 (1986): 377–386. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(198611)37:6<377::aid-asi2>3.0.co;2-c.
"Opinion Leadership, Poverty, and Information Sharing." Reference Quarterly 26, no 3 (1987): 341–353.

"The Information World of Low-Skilled Workers". Library and Information Science Research. 9 (4): 265–83. 1987.

Chatman, Elfreda A. (1991). "Life in a Small World: Applicability of Gratification Theory to Information-Seeking Behavior". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42 (6): 438–449. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199107)42:6<438::AID-ASI6>3.0.CO;2-B.

"Alienation theory: Application of a conceptual framework to a study of information among janitors". Reference Quarterly. 29 (3): 355. 1990.

"Channels to a Larger Social World: Older Women Staying in Contact with the Great Society". Library and Information Science Research. 13 (3): 281–300. 1991.

The information world of retired women. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.[1]

"The Role of Mentorship in Shaping Public Library Leaders". Library Trends. 40 (3): 492–512. 1992.

Pendleton, Victoria (1995). "Knowledge Gap, Information-Seeking and the Poor". Reference Librarian. 49–50: 135–145.

Chatman, Elfreda A. (1996). "The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 47 (3): 193–206. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199603)47:3<193::aid-asi3>3.3.co;2-m.

Pendleton, Victoria (1998). "Small World Lives: Implications for the public library". Library Trends. 46 (4): 732.

Chatman, Elfreda A. (1999). "A Theory of Life in the Round". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 50 (3): 207–217. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.83.4478. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(1999)50:3<207::aid-asi3>3.3.co;2-#.

Chatman, Elfreda A. (2000-12-01). "Framing social life in theory and research". The New Review of Information Behaviour Research. 1: 3–17.

Huotari, Maija-Leena (2001). "Using everyday life information seeking to explain organizational behavior". Library & Information Science Research. 23 (4): 351–366. doi:10.1016/s0740-8188(01)00093-7.

Burnett, Gary; Besant, Michele (2001). "Small Worlds: Normative behavior in virtual communities and feminist bookselling". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 52 (7): 536–547. doi:10.1002/asi.1102.abs.

Dawson, E. Murrell (2001). "Reference group theory with implications for information studies: a theoretical essay". Information Research: An International Electronic Journal. 6 (3): 105.

Offices

American Library Association. Library Research Round Table. Active during the 1980s and 1990s, and Chair 1993-1994.

Awards

Association of College and Research Libraries. Best Book Award, 1995, for The Information World of Retired Women.
School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. NC starting in 1985, and a research award there is named for her.
The Association for Information Science and Technology confers the Elfreda A. Chatman Research Award for research proposals in information behavior. [1]