Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking

The Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking, or CMIS, is a theoretical construct designed to predict how people will seek information. It was first developed by J. David Johnson and has been utilized by a variety of disciplines including Library and Information Science and Health Communication.

The CMIS has been empirically tested in health and organizational contexts The CMIS has inherent strengths for studying how people react to health problems such as cancer. The CMIS specifies antecedents that explain why people become information seekers, information carrier characteristics that shape how people go about looking for information, and information seeking actions that reflect the nature of the search itself.

The CMIS has been quantitatively tested and performs well when it comes to health information seeking behaviors (HISB). There are three main schemas in the CMIS. These are: Antecedents, information field, and information seeking actions. The antecedents are those factors that determine how an information consumer will receive the information. Those factors are: Demographics, personal experience, salience, and beliefs. These factors are fluid and can change during the health information seeking process. The second schema is the information fields that consist of characteristics and utilities. This schema is concerned with the channels and carriers of information. A person’s understanding is developed through the information field. The third schema involves the transformational processes and measured by the consumer’s understanding of the messages received through the information field. The final schema involves information seeking actions. This is what the consumer does as a result of the first two schemas through information seeking. There are three major dimensions: the scope, depth, and method of information seeking.

The CMIS antecedents—demographics, personal experience, salience, and beliefs—are factors that determine an individual's natural predisposition to search for information from particular information carriers. Certain types of health information seeking can be triggered by an individual's degree of personal experience with disease. In the CMIS framework, two personal relevance factors, salience and beliefs, are seen as the primary determinants in translating a perceived gap into an active search for information. Salience refers to the personal significance of health information to the individual, such as perceptions of risk to one's health, which are likely to result in information seeking action. However, people also may be motivated to gather information to determine the implications of health events for themselves and/or others related to their future activities, a factor directly related to the rapidly growing field of genetics. An individual's beliefs about the nature of a particular disease, its impacts, and level of control, all directly relate to self-efficacy, one of our key variables, and one that plays an important role in information seeking and people's more general pattern of actions related to health.

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