Rethinking Interest in Studies of Interactive Information Retrieval

ABSTRACTInterest characterizes a cognitive-emotional relationship between people and information and is a key construct in human information interaction. As a motivational variable, interest has been widely studied in psychology and education, but has received less consistent and theory-driven attention in the field of interactive information retrieval (IIR). In this perspective paper we examine the role of interest and review how it has been studied and operationalized in IIR research. We draw upon a survey of 58 research studies that have manipulated, controlled or measured searcher interest in some way. The intent of the paper is to raise the profile of interest as a user-centred variable in IIR and to advocate for more conceptual and methodological consistency in future studies to better evaluate the impact of interest in information search.