THE NEW ZEALAND LIBRARY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT JOURNAL NGĀ PŪRONGO

NEW ZEALAND LIBRARY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT JOURNAL • NGĀ PŪRONGO VOL 55, ISSUE NO. 3 • OCTOBER 2015
The following could be inferred from Table 3 (lower triangle):
• All correlations are positive, i.e. there are positive
associations between ranks. In other words, if the
people to whom men went for information are higher
ranked in one age group they will be also higher ranked
in the other age group.
• However, the strength of association, i.e. correlations
decrease with an increase in the distance between age
groups. For instance, the rank list of the youngest age
group (15-24) almost perfectly matches the rank list of
the next age group (25-34). The Spearman’s rank-order
correlation is 0.90 and statistically significant at the 1%
level. However, correlation between the rank list of the
youngest age group (15-24) and the oldest age group
(65+) decreases to only 0.41 and is not statistically
significant.
Therefore, we would reject the null hypothesis (H1a) and
conclude that the information-seeking behaviors of New
Zealand men are changing with age. When they are young
they would approach different people for information, help and
support when they feel stressed, than when they are seniors.
Of course the explanation for these changes in the
information-seeking behavior is partly quite trivial. Namely,
when they are young they might not have spouse/partner and
children to ask for information and help. Therefore, spouse/
partner and children would be ranked lower on their list of
people. Similarly, with the last two age groups, most of the men
would not have at that age mother or father to approach and
ask for information and help. Therefore these people (mothers
and fathers) would be ranked lower on the list than it is the case
with the younger age groups.
4.1.2 Ethnicity
We repeated the analysis using the ethnicity variable with
three ethnic groups. The rank lists in Table 4 are quite similar
are no differences between ethnic groups when New Zealand
men decide to whom they will go to for information, help and
support when they are experiencing life difficulties.
Table 5: Correlation matrix (ethnicity)
The following could be inferred from Table 5 (lower triangle):
• All correlations are positive, i.e. there are positive
associations between ranks. In other words, if the people
to whom men went for information are higher ranked in
one ethnic group they will be also higher ranked in the
other ethnic group.
• The strength of association, i.e. correlations are quite
high and all are significant to at least a 5% level. In other
words, rank lists are quite stable across ethnic groups.
Therefore, we can’t reject the null hypothesis (H1b) and we
conclude that the information seeking behavior of New Zealand
men are quite similar across the three ethnic groups.
4.2 Offering Information, Support And Help
Based on answers on question ‘Who are the people to
whom you would offer help and support?’ proportions of
people to whom participants would offer help and support
across three ethnic groups in spite of some small variations.
Table 4: Rank list of the people to whom men went for
information by ethnicity
To assess whether these variations are statistically significant
a Spearman’s rank-order correlation was run to determine the
relationship between ranks on these three ethnic group rank
lists. Results of calculation are given in the lower triangle of
Table 5 (below the main diagonal). The upper part of Table 5
will be used later to address the second question raised in the
introductory section. All correlations are positive and highly
statistically significant (at the 1% level) which suggests the three
rank lists are similar. In other words, our study suggests there
were calculated and presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Who are the people to whom you would offer help
and support?
Similar proportions were calculated for the age group and
ethnicity variable. These proportions were then used to rank
people by each category in both age and ethnicity variables.
The rank lists by age and ethnicity variables are presented in
Table 6 and Table 7 respectively.
4.2.1 Age
The last, total, column in Table 6 suggests that Male friends
were the first people New Zealand men would offer help and
support. Male friends were followed by Spouses/Partners,
Female friends, and Work colleagues in this particular order.
26