Recognizing and adjusting: developing an adaptive team information seeking framework for emergency situation assessment

Effective situation assessment requires response teams to adapt their information seeking during emergencies. However, research on team adaptation often overlooks the specific cues and processes that support information seeking. Meanwhile, studies of collaborative information seeking and sensemaking rarely address how teams adapt to address emergent information needs. This study bridges this gap by proposing an integrative framework of adaptive team information seeking developed through a case study in which emergency response teams recognized cues of ambiguity and uncertainty and adjusted their search goals and tasks to address information needs that arose during a 2020 shooting incident in Phoenix, Arizona. Findings also highlight the need for teams to recognize goal and task interdependencies, and coordinate adjustments to broad and targeted searches within time and resource constraints. The introduced framework describes the process of adaptive team information seeking and can guide evaluations of systems designed to support adaptation in team situation assessment.