Investigating the Barriers of Theorizing the Knowledge and Information Science field from the Perspective of Faculty Members of Universities of Iran

Preliminary evidence and review of previous research indicate that theorizing in the field of information science is not in a good position. The purpose of this study is to weigh the barriers to theorizing in this field. In fact, in this research we seek to know how many obstacles each of the barriers of theorizing has.

The present research is in the category of applied research in terms of purpose and in the category of library and descriptive-survey research in terms of data collection method. Data were collected by a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by information experts. Cronbach's alpha was used to evaluate the reliability. The reliability of the questionnaire was also reported .87% and was confirmed accordingly. The statistical population of this research formed the faculty members of the field of information science of Iran’s universities. In this study, the sampling unit was the university and the sampling method was sequential. In the first stage, each university was selected by random. In the next stage, among the faculty members of each university, the final sample was purposefully selected. Questionnaires were distributed among 60 faculty members in the field. Out of 60 distributed questionnaires, 37 questionnaires were returned. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. In order to answer the research questions, one-sample t-test was used. SPSS software was used to analyze the data.

The results of one-sample t-test showed that individual, educational, cultural and managerial barriers have a great extent, economic and social barriers have a large extent hinder in theorizing of information science. Among these barriers, educational barriers with an average of 4/18 have the most, and political barriers with an average of 3/66 have the lowest barrier.

So far, the barriers of theorizing in information science field have not been analyzed with a quantitative approach, so the present study is original in terms of subject and method of analysis.