The cognitive and the social approaches have often been used to study human information behavior. The cognitive approach focuses on “understanding the way each person thinks and behaves in response to information needs” (Pettigrew, Fidel, & Bruce, 2001, p. 47), and the social approach highlights the influences of social factors on information behavior (Jaeger & Burnett, 2010). In academic contexts, information behavior often entails both work-related and everyday life information behavior (Given, 2002), but many researchers investigating the information activities of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students have focused only on work-related aspects using information seeking behavior frameworks derived from the cognitive approach, tending to deal with individuals’ purposive behavior in finding information to satisfy their academic information needs. The cognitive approach suffers from lack of sufficient explanations about interpersonal sources and often regards people solely as intermediaries whose role limited to providing referral services (Barrett, 2005; Catalano, 2013; George et al., 2006). This paper discusses the relative strengths of using the social approach in comparison with the cognitive approach to examine interpersonal information behavior in academic contexts.
