Expect to Feel Lost · Method · DoingResearch.net

Purpose

You start a project feeling hopeful. A week of reading later, you seem to know less than when you began: sources disagree, the words are new, and every article opens three more questions. Many people decide at this point that they’re bad at research or picked the wrong topic, and some give up.

Carol Kuhlthau, a professor of library and information science at Rutgers, spent more than two decades studying this experience. She began in the 1980s with high school students writing research papers, then studied users of school, college and public libraries, and later people at work. Her Information Search Process (ISP) model describes what people think, feel and do at each stage of a research task. Her central finding is that confidence doesn’t rise steadily as you learn. It drops soon after you start, during the stage she calls exploration, and recovers when you form a focus. She calls this being “in the dip.”

Knowing the dip is coming changes what you do in it. This page is about getting through it.

When you need it

You’ve been reading for a while and feel more confused than when you started.
Your sources contradict each other and you can’t tell which way of framing the topic is right.
You can’t yet say in one sentence what you’re looking for, so your searches return too much or nothing useful.
You’re tempted to switch topics, or to quit.
You’re helping a student, colleague or friend who has hit this point.

How to do it

1Know the stages

Kuhlthau’s model has six stages, each with its typical feelings:

Initiation: you realize you need to understand something. Uncertainty and apprehension are common.
Selection: you pick a general topic, and feel a brief burst of optimism.
Exploration: you read around the topic. What you find is inconsistent and doesn’t fit what you already knew, so confusion, frustration and doubt often grow.
Formulation: you form a focus, a particular angle on the topic. This is the turning point: uncertainty falls and confidence rises.
Collection: you gather material on your focus, and interest deepens.
Presentation: you finish and explain or use what you learned. Relief, with satisfaction or disappointment depending on how it went.

The chart of the model in the 2004 edition of her book Seeking Meaning adds a seventh column, assessment: looking back afterward, with a sense of accomplishment and more awareness of how you work.

2Expect the dip in exploration

Kuhlthau found that new information often raises uncertainty before it lowers it, especially early on. In exploration you meet ideas from many viewpoints that don’t fit together yet. She calls it the hardest stage, the one where some people abandon the search. Her advice is to expect uncertainty to rise here, rather than take it as a sign that something has gone wrong. Feeling lost at this point is a stage, not a verdict on you or your topic.

3Explore before you collect

A common mistake she found is to jump from choosing a topic straight to collecting material, skipping exploration. Exploring is how you build a new understanding; collecting gathers evidence for a focus you already have. So read for orientation first: encyclopedia entries, review articles, textbook chapters. Note the recurring ideas, names and disagreements, and the questions that interest you. Save detailed notes for later, when you can tell what’s relevant.

4Stay open early, close down later

Kuhlthau borrows an idea from the psychologist George Kelly: the stance you take opens or narrows your search. An open, “invitational” stance, following tangents and asking questions, helps in the early stages. A closing, “indicative” stance, deciding and wrapping up, helps later. Trouble comes from using the wrong one at the wrong time: closing too early, or never closing at all.

5Look for a focus and test it

Formulation is what ends the dip. Write a candidate focus in one sentence, then test it against the four questions Kuhlthau’s model uses for choosing a topic and a focus: What am I trying to accomplish? How much time do I have? What do I find interesting? What information can I actually get? Treat the focus as a working hypothesis you can revise. She found it usually emerges gradually, not in a flash. Find your focus covers this step in detail.

6Ask for help at the low point

Kuhlthau calls the stretch of rising uncertainty a “zone of intervention”: the point where help from a librarian, teacher or adviser does the most good, because it lets you do what you can’t yet do alone. The idea is modeled on the psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. Don’t wait until you’re nearly done to ask. Describing what you’ve found so far to someone else is also a good way to see the shape of a focus.

Try it

Your task

Find Carol Kuhlthau’s own description of her Information Search Process model on her faculty website at Rutgers University. Answer three questions. Which stage is marked by a dip in confidence? Which stage does she call the turning point? What does she say helps people get through the dip?

Show a hint

Search for her name plus “information search process.” Read the stage descriptions, then the sections on the principle of uncertainty and the zone of intervention.

Show the answer and the path

Her site (wp.comminfo.rutgers.edu/ckuhlthau, page “Information Search Process”) lists six stages: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection and presentation. The chart on the same page adds a seventh column, assessment.

The dip comes in exploration, the third stage, when people meet inconsistent, incompatible information and feel confused, frustrated and doubtful. She calls it the most difficult stage and notes that some people give up there.
The turning point is formulation, the fourth stage, when a focus forms, uncertainty falls and confidence rises.
What helps: expecting uncertainty to rise during exploration instead of treating it as a sign that something is wrong; tolerating that uncertainty long enough to form a focus; not skipping straight from selection to collection; and getting help from someone like a librarian or teacher during the dip, which she calls the zone of intervention.

If you named exploration and formulation, and found the advice to expect the rise in uncertainty, you read her model right.

Common mistakes

Taking confusion as proof you chose the wrong topic. Switching topics usually just starts the dip again.
Skipping exploration. Jumping from a topic to collecting sources leaves you with a pile of material and no thread through it.
Taking detailed notes on everything early. Before you have a focus you can’t tell what’s relevant, so the notes pile up unused.
Searching harder to make the feeling go away. In exploration, more information often adds to the confusion. Thinking about what you’ve already read is what forms a focus.
Waiting until the end to ask for help. The dip is when a librarian or adviser can help most.

Limits

Kuhlthau’s model describes complex tasks: a research paper, a report, a project that requires real learning. Her workplace studies found that people doing routine tasks, such as answering a simple question or tracking a regular update, don’t usually go through the stages. If you’re checking a single claim, the four moves in Check a claim fit better.

It describes common patterns, not a law. People feel the dip to different degrees, and experience with a field changes how much of it you feel. Much of the original research was done before web search. Kuhlthau has argued that easy access to huge amounts of information hasn’t removed the problem and may make early confusion worse. A 2008 follow-up study she wrote with Jannica Heinström and Ross Todd found the model still useful for explaining how students research.

Finally, feeling lost isn’t always the dip. Sometimes the topic really is too big, or the sources are out of reach. Telling the two apart is the job of Find your focus.