Sense-Making Methodology
Also known as: Dervin Sense-Making, Situation-Gap-Use Model, Sense-Making Approach, Gap-Bridging Methodology
Sense-Making Methodology, developed by Brenda Dervin from the 1970s onward and synthesized in her 1998 overview, is a theory and method for studying how people construct meaning as they move through life and are repeatedly stopped by gaps in their understanding. Its central metaphor pictures a person moving through time-space, halted at a moment of discontinuity (a gap), and building a bridge across it by seeking and using information. Rather than classifying users by demographic traits, Sense-Making asks what situation a person was in, what gap or question they faced, and what help or use they sought — the situation-gap-use triad — elicited through the distinctive Time-Line and Micro-Moment interview. The approach reframes information not as an objective thing transmitted but as a construction people make sense of in context.
Key highlights
- Centers the user's own sense-making, eliciting needs in context rather than imposing system- or expert-defined categories.
- The situation-gap-use triad is content- and demographic-neutral, allowing comparison of information needs across very different people and topics.
- The Time-Line and Micro-Moment interview yields concrete, event-grounded accounts that resist vague generalization.
- Provides a coherent theory-and-method package linking a constructivist view of information to practical service and system design.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use Sense-Making Methodology when you want to understand information needs and use from the user's own perspective, in context, and especially when conventional demographic or system-centered approaches fail to explain behavior. It is well suited to studying how people cope with confusing, novel or troubling situations, to redesigning services around real questions rather than assumed audiences, and to comparing needs across diverse populations through a shared situational lens. It is less appropriate when you need quick quantitative prevalence estimates, when the task is routine known-item retrieval with no real discontinuity, or when resources do not allow the intensive, in-depth interviewing the method demands. The approach is fundamentally qualitative and constructivist, so it fits exploratory, theory-building, and service-design goals better than confirmatory hypothesis testing.
Strengths & limitations
- Centers the user's own sense-making, eliciting needs in context rather than imposing system- or expert-defined categories.
- The situation-gap-use triad is content- and demographic-neutral, allowing comparison of information needs across very different people and topics.
- The Time-Line and Micro-Moment interview yields concrete, event-grounded accounts that resist vague generalization.
- Provides a coherent theory-and-method package linking a constructivist view of information to practical service and system design.
- Intensive interviewing and coding make it labor-intensive and hard to scale to large samples.
- Its constructivist stance and bespoke vocabulary can be difficult to operationalize consistently across analysts.
- Findings are situational and interpretive, so generalization and quantitative prevalence claims are limited.
- Reliance on recall of past stopped moments introduces memory and reconstruction bias.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What is the situation-gap-use triad at the core of Sense-Making?
It is the three-part analytic unit Dervin uses to describe a moment when someone is stopped and seeks information. The Situation is the time-space context in which the person was halted; the Gap is the question or sense-need that stopped them; and the Use is the help they sought and how they planned to use it to move on. By characterizing people through the gaps they face and the help they need rather than through fixed demographic traits, the triad lets researchers compare information needs across very different individuals and topics.
How does the Micro-Moment Time-Line interview work?
The respondent reconstructs an experience as a time-line — an ordered sequence of steps or events that actually happened. At each step (each micro-moment) the interviewer asks a consistent set of questions probing what the situation was, what gaps or confusions arose, and what help the person sought and how they used it. Anchoring questions to concrete events rather than asking for general opinions produces detailed, comparable, context-rich accounts of how the person made sense, which is what the analysis then categorizes.
How does Sense-Making differ from system-centered information studies?
System- and source-centered studies start from messages, channels and audience demographics, treating information as an objective thing to be transmitted to defined groups. Sense-Making instead starts from the user's situated act of constructing meaning, treats information as a human construction, and characterizes need by the gap a person faces rather than by who they are. The practical implication is that good services and systems must be dialogic and situation-responsive — discovering each person's situation, gap and intended use — rather than pushing predefined content at presumed audience segments.
Sources
- 1.Dervin, B. (1998). Sense-making theory and practice: an overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2(2), 36-46.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Sense-Making Methodology. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/library-information-science/sense-making-methodology