Everyday Life Information Seeking

Way of life is the relatively settled 'order of things' that organizes a person's daily existence — how they divide time between work and leisure, structure consumption, and pursue interests — shaped by their habitus. Mastery of life is the active effort to keep that order coherent and to restore it when problems disrupt it. Information seeking flows from both: it is part of how people maintain their everyday order and repair it when something goes wrong. Savolainen further distinguishes mastery styles (optimistic-cognitive, pessimistic-cognitive, defensive-affective, pessimistic-affective) describing how confidently and systematically people tackle problems.

Work-task models study information seeking as goal-directed activity tied to a job or professional problem. ELIS deliberately turns to the non-work sphere — the everyday domains of health, family, hobbies, consumption and civic life — and explains seeking there in relation to a person's whole way of life and social position rather than to a discrete task. It treats much everyday seeking as habitual and embedded in routine, triggered by disruptions to one's order, and shaped by class and habitus, which work-task models generally hold constant or ignore.

Because Savolainen found that everyday information behaviour varies systematically with social position, not just with the immediate situation. Drawing on Bourdieu, ELIS holds that habitus — durable dispositions acquired through one's social trajectory — and material and cultural capital shape what order a person keeps, how they go about mastering life, and which sources feel natural, accessible and trustworthy. This socio-cultural grounding lets the model explain patterned differences in everyday seeking and source preference across social groups, which purely individual cognitive accounts cannot.