How conducting a research review can identify unmet information needs.

News organizations and information creators that practice service-minded journalism strive to meet the information needs of their intended audiences, including both new and existing audience segments that evolve with time.

While we cover several research methods in the Gazzetta process, diving into prior academic research is one important strategy to identifying information needs, especially for hard-to-reach populations.

In restricted information environments, accessing populations and having an up-to-date understanding of their needs can be difficult due to restrictions on ourselves such as being unable to enter their country, the legal gray area of conducting interviews and reporting, and putting people at risk by interacting with them.

This makes understanding the context of their lives and information needs all the more important, because we do not have first-hand experience of it and we cannot directly ask them about it in person, meaning that our assumptions and biases may go unchallenged.

Jump: WHAT resources you need | HOW to use quantitative methods | WHY to use mixed methods | HOW to identify information needs | WHAT to do next

Conducting a comprehensive research review can be a starting place for challenging or confirming our assumptions and updating our prior understanding with more recently-obtained information. Academic research, such as reading sociological studies of your intended audience, may seem dry, outdated, or simply feel out of touch based on your understanding of your audience.

But linking existing research to your work can contribute to the information available about your intended audience and bring to light such gaps and how to fill them. Also, using existing research as background information can be a strategy to save time and effort, and avoid replicating work while uncovering the challenges and opportunities your intended audience faces and how you could meet them.

We do this at Gazzetta frequently. For example, in one of Gazzetta’s projects, we employed a quantified method to analyze existing research on our intended audience, which revealed underlying trends and patterns about the economic, social, and political changes influencing their lives. This shaped the direction of our project in a number of ways.

As part of our overall methodology, we then compared our findings from these research reviews to information we gathered from interviews we conducted with academics and practitioners working in the field with our intended audience. That led us to learn more up-to-date information about our intended audience than had appeared in the existing research we reviewed.

We also assigned confidence levels to our data; the existing quantitative research was not incorrect at the time it was published, but more recent qualitative information adds to that understanding and follows on the prior research. We could then search for other data points confirming or contradicting the more timely qualitative research.

What’s involved in conducting a research review.

Before getting started, a piece of advice: A research review is not about the volume of data collected as a part of the process, but the quality of insights gained from it. In other words, are you meeting your research goals and finding what you set out to learn?

Results from research reviews can challenge and confirm pre-existing assumptions, allow you to discover unexpected findings, and provide a base level of sufficient understanding of your intended audience.

Much like the process of building empathy when practicing service-oriented journalism, the goal of a research review is to build understanding rather than achieve complete or perfect knowledge. Below, we outline the steps involved in conducting a research review, and in later sections, explore approaches to research review analysis we’ve used in prior projects.

1. Gather resources: To begin, start by collecting what has already been studied about your intended audience. Survey the volume of research collected and the categories of research topics. If your intended audience is quite broad and there is a vast quantity of information, you can focus your research review on the topic of information needs of your audience, or narrow your audience for the purpose of the research review. For example, if your intended audience is all residents of a particular city, you could tailor your research review to cover how they consume information, or to one segment of that population, with an eye toward expanding coverage or launching a new topic of coverage.

2. Analyze your sources: Now, it’s time to analyze your sources and learn what prior research can reveal about your audience. This step can take as much or as little time as you have available. Reading each piece of literature takes time and is not always necessary, so begin by scanning article summaries, tables of contents, and conclusion sections of articles.

3. Assign confidence levels: Next, after you’ve surveyed your sources and drawn out key findings, critically evaluate each data point by assigning a confidence level. Considering factors such as sample size, methodology, and potential biases in each study, to prevent over-reliance on findings with low confidence levels.

You might conduct a research review once and take away some key findings that shape the direction of your reporting and dissemination. However, as new research is always being published, you can keep an eye out for new research that may continue to inform your approach.

To balance the continuous need to learn about your audience, we recommend setting research goals and moving on to other parts of audience research methodology when you feel you have gathered sufficient information to move confidently toward next steps, such as surveying your intended audience.

Use quantitative analysis to show trends in volume and shifts in focus areas over time.

At Gazzetta, we conducted a quantitative analysis of existing studies, including examining both the volume and focus of research to identify broader trends and shifts in attention over time.

Gaining a historical perspective in this way helped us to understand the evolving nature of our intended audience’s needs through tracing how research priorities related to them shifted over time. This surfaced emerging trends, persistent challenges, and areas where information needs were greatest.

After collecting the existing studies on our intended audience, we used a couple methods of analysis to do this:

Bibliometric analysis

Bibliometric analysis of the database, which looks at the number and type of research available, revealed significant trends in the volume of research related to our intended audience. We tracked the number of publications on certain keywords over the past two decades to understand the broader trajectory of research related to them.

We learned from this analysis that the volume of information need-related studies on the intended audience declined since the early 2010s. This was part of a broader pattern, as we saw research on our intended audience and their information needs showing downward trajectories beginning in 2009 and and again in 2014.

At the same time as we saw these trends, broader information-related research within the larger field grew. This suggested more researchers recognized the importance of information needs in understanding the population’s general experience, even as the overall research volume  decreased.

Likewise, using bibliometric analysis of other populations and in other regions may reveal that the information needs of the demographic are well-studied, out-dated, non-existent, etc. These findings can shape the depth and direction of research you pursue into audience information needs.

Keyword frequency

We used analysis of keyword frequency, which examines the number of times a topic or word appears in the research collected, to provide insight into the evolving focus of our research, which turned to a subset of our intended audience.

One major takeaway was learning about a focus on a demographic of our intended audience:  we observed a specific modifier attached to the general term for our intended audience appearing 93 times in the literature we collected, while a general term for our intended audience appeared 148 times. This helped us to  take into account this distinction in our broader project’s research analysis of our intended audience’s information needs.

Employ mixed methods and techniques to generate specific insights, but be aware of biases and shortcomings.

Early audience research primarily relied on straightforward survey methods, focusing on quantifying needs and satisfaction levels across various information categories. As the field has matured, researchers have increasingly adopted mixed-method approaches that combine quantitative data with rich qualitative insights.

This reflects the growing recognition of the complex, contextual nature of information behaviors and growing opportunities for audience research.

Here’s some examples of recent studies that employed innovative techniques to gather data, which we came across in collecting existing studies for our research review:

1. Comparative experiments: A survey within the last decade compared the online information searching behaviour of our intended audience with another demographic.
2. Snowball sampling and workplace integration: Another survey within the last decade had managers distribute questionnaires in workplaces, and used snowball sampling through business owners’ networks.
3. Seasonal opportunities: A more recent study collected questionnaire data and conducted in-depth interviews during a holiday period in which our intended audience had more free time.
4. Collaboration with health services: Another more recent study collaborated with a community health service center to conduct surveys, free clinics, and follow-up visits, integrating health service provision with research on our intended audience.
5. Virtual ethnography: A very recent study employed internet ethnography, observing chat groups of our intended audience to understand their social media use and local identity.

These innovative methods showed how others overcame challenges of accessing our intended audience to capture the nuanced, context-dependent nature of their information behaviors. Likewise, in our project, we then supplemented our research review of quantitative literature analysis with qualitative research.

Despite  advancements in research methods across the field, challenges persist in standardizing research approaches. The lack of standardized segmentation methods for categorizing our intended audience’s information needs made it difficult to draw robust comparisons across studies or to identify clear trends over time.

Use your research review to identify key focus areas of audience information needs.

Our research review revealed the information needs of our intended audience coalesced around key focus areas that reflected the diverse challenges and opportunities they faced. To analyze these areas, we:

• Summarized focus areas through keywords: This allowed us to quickly identify and categorize the main themes emerging from the research;
• Recorded key data points from research: We noted important statistics and findings to provide evidence and context for each focus area;
• Linked findings back to the original journal: This ensured traceability and facilitated revisiting the original source for further information.

Our research review revealed background information about our intended audience that helped us build empathy with them by understanding their daily life, grueling work schedule, and loneliness at work. It also revealed what kinds of information they seek and utilize, how and when they interact with media, and for what purposes, and how those were informed by gender differences.

From these insights, we were able to narrow the focus of our reporting subjects and strategized around which platforms and channels to use to publish information.

How your research review can live on.

A research review is part of an iterative process. At Gazzetta, we’ve revisited our research reviews and conducted additional research as projects progress and new information becomes available. Subsequent research reviews that are focused on specific topics or keywords may also be needed in later phases to address emerging questions and to refine understanding.

The final step of audience research is to apply the findings to your work creating news and information. In our work, the findings from our research review helped us narrow our intended audience for a reporting project.

We did this after finding that within the broader intended audience for our research review, there were people seeking a specific employment opportunity who were in need of accurate data about the labour rights and employment prospects. We knew that we could fill that need with our reporting, and that this information could potentially lead to significant quality of life improvements for themselves, their families, and their communities.

In your work, you may not always have the same research goal or outcome, but findings of the research review should be reflected in the decisions you make about your reporting, dissemination, and other aspects of your journalism.

Rooting your future actions in the findings of the research, and specifically those with the highest assigned confidence levels, will ensure that your work is representative and responsive to your intended audience’s information needs.

Join us on our process in the audience research phase and beyond. If you haven’t already, sign up to our newsletter so you don’t miss out.

If you have feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch at hello@gazzetta.xyz.