Strategies for Finding and Evaluating Information about Personal Finance Topics: The Role of Government Information

Abstract

In this paper, we present work-in-progress results from the stimulated recall portion of a U.S.-based lab study that investigated the influence of financial knowledge and cognitive abilities on the search performance, relevance assessments, and mental workload of adults searching the Internet for personal finance topics. Participants were asked to retrospectively think aloud while viewing screen recordings of one of their search tasks. Qualitative, inductive coding was applied to transcribed interviews. An early theme about government websites and information emerged in the data analysis and that is the topic of this paper. For all three tasks, participants prioritized and valued information from U.S. government websites over that of commercial websites, which seems to contradict recent national surveys indicating low levels of trust in government information sources and the government in general. Our findings suggest that for certain topics, especially those associated with high levels of uncertainty, people might resort to more basic search and evaluation behaviors.