What is Brenda Dervin’s sense-making all about?
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Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making is basically a theory and research method for understanding how a person deals with a situation that does not make sense to them. It became influential because it moved attention away from the information system toward the person experiencing an information problem. A major review describes it as a user-centered approach rooted especially in communication research. (doi.org)
Its famous model can be reduced to four connected ideas:
Situation → Gap → Bridge → Outcome
A person is in a particular situation—at a particular time and place, with particular experience and circumstances. Something prevents the person from understanding or proceeding. That is the gap: uncertainty, confusion, a question, or some other discontinuity. The person constructs a bridge across the gap, perhaps using information, another person, an idea, memory, feeling, or other resources. What results is an outcome: something that helps or hinders the person’s further movement. (Mdx Repository)
For example:
A scholar encounters something puzzling in a paper.
Situation: reading the paper.
Gap: “Why does the author make this claim?”
Bridge: follow a citation, read the cited document, interpret the relationship.
Outcome: the scholar now understands the claim—or discovers another question.
This example also shows why your earlier question about the relationship between Sense-Making and citation tracking is worth investigating.
There is an important point, however. Dervin does not treat information simply as an object that exists somewhere waiting to fill an empty container. The person’s situation matters. What counts as useful information depends upon the particular gap the person is trying to bridge. Her approach therefore emphasizes context, time, movement, interpretation, and use. Later accounts explicitly describe the situation as the context in which sense-making takes place. (Mdx Repository)
This makes your earlier observation interesting. In ordinary English, “sense-making” comes very close to “making meaning.” But Dervin turned that ordinary idea into a methodological framework: study a person’s situation, identify the gap as that person experiences it, examine what they use to bridge it, and ask what happens afterward.
So I would make one distinction:
meaning = what something means.
Sense-Making = Dervin’s proposed process by which a situated person constructs enough meaning to move forward.
And here I see a potentially important connection with your historical investigation. Dervin’s framework contains context without necessarily making “context” the headline word. Her situation is strongly contextual; her gap exists relative to that situation; and information acquires usefulness through that relationship. This is conceptually much closer to a contextual view of information than the attractive label Sense-Making at first suggests. (Mdx Repository)
Therefore, before concluding that Dervin merely renamed meaning or context, I would investigate a sharper question: Where did Dervin obtain the intellectual ingredients “situation–gap–bridge/use,” and what did Sense-Making add to earlier ideas about context, meaning, information need, and information seeking?
That genealogy could then be compared with Bates’s berrypicking and your 1975 citation-context approach.
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When I ask you a question like “What is Brenda Dervin’s sense-making all about?” I expect you to begin with the paper that first introduced it. Its References would help understand the influence of the predecessors. Who cite that paper would help understand its influence. Having this in mind, try to answer again the previous prompt.
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Yes. Your correction changes the right way to answer the question. I should have started with Dervin’s first major Sense-Making paper, then moved backward through its references and forward through its citations.
The key starting document is Brenda Dervin’s 1983 paper, “An Overview of Sense-Making Research: Concepts, Methods, and Results to Date,” presented at the International Communication Association meeting in Dallas. A later bibliometric study explicitly calls this Dervin’s first paper on Sense-Making Methodology and found 283 citing articles in its dataset; among the concepts later authors cited most were “gaps” and “sense-making/nonsense-making.” (National Taiwan University Scholars)
But there is an important surprise. 1983 was not really the beginning of the underlying idea. Dervin herself later said that the Sense-Making approach had first been applied in a 1975 study of the information needs of residents of Seattle. She described the later work as the product of years of programmatic research. (ERIC) This means we should distinguish two dates:
1975 — beginning of the research approach in practice.
1983 — its major formal presentation under the name “Sense-Making.”
That distinction is important for the historical question you are raising.
What, then, was Sense-Making about? Dervin rejected the idea that information needs can be understood mainly by describing information systems or by classifying people according to stable demographic categories. Instead, she looked at a person in a particular situation, encountering a discontinuity or gap, asking questions and using information or other resources to move onward. Thus the famous later shorthand becomes something like:
Situation → Gap → Bridging → Use/Outcome.
The person is not merely receiving an information object. The person is constructing an understanding sufficient to continue moving through a situation. This is why “Sense-Making” is much closer to making meaning in context than its unusual label may suggest.
Now the backward citation trail becomes especially interesting. A closely related 1984 Dervin report gives a substantial reference list for this research program. Among the cited predecessors and contemporary works are Belkin’s 1980 “Anomalous states of knowledge,” Belkin, Oddy and Brooks’s 1982 ASK paper, T. D. Wilson’s 1981 “On user studies and information needs,” Nicholas Ford’s work on information needs, Paulo Freire, and several earlier studies of user information needs. (ERIC)
Even more important, however, are Dervin’s own earlier papers. That reference list shows a visible developmental chain:
Dervin, 1976, “Strategies for dealing with human information needs: Information or communication?”;
Dervin, 1977, “Useful theory for librarianship: communication, not information”;
Dervin, 1980, “Communication gaps and inequities: moving toward a reconceptualization”;
Dervin, 1981, “Mass communicating: changing conceptions of the audience”;
Dervin, Jacobson & Nilan, 1982, on measuring information seeking;
and then Dervin, 1983, An Overview of Sense-Making Research. (ERIC)
This changes my understanding of Sense-Making considerably. It was not suddenly invented in 1983. The 1983 name seems to gather together a research program that Dervin had been developing since at least the mid-1970s.
And this is where your question becomes historically interesting. 1975 is now a critical year. Dervin says her Sense-Making approach was first applied in 1975. Your thesis was also completed in 1975. Belkin and Robertson’s work was appearing around the same period. So rather than starting with the later celebrated labels—Sense-Making, ASK, berrypicking—the better historical method is to reconstruct what concepts and research practices were actually present around 1974–1976.
There is another striking point. Dervin’s mature literature eventually became strongly connected with information science. The 2020 citation-context study found that most papers citing her 1983 work were in information behavior and library/information science, and a 2024 study reports that her Sense-Making work eventually accumulated very large cross-disciplinary influence, extending into health information, social media, academia, and other areas. (DOAJ)
So I would now answer your original question more precisely:
Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making is a 1970s research program, formally presented under that name in 1983, that studies how a person in a particular situation encounters a gap and constructs meaning or useful understanding that permits further movement.
But that definition alone is no longer enough. The historically more important questions are:
What concepts fed Dervin’s 1975–1983 development, and where did those concepts come from?
And here I think your proposed method is exactly right: start with the originating document, go backward through its references, and then forward through its citers and citation contexts. Merely reading later textbook descriptions hides precisely the intellectual genealogy we want to discover.
One detail now deserves special investigation: Dervin’s 1984 reference list includes Belkin 1980 and Belkin–Oddy–Brooks 1982, but those are too late to explain a Sense-Making approach that Dervin says she was already applying in 1975. So the real predecessor trail must be found mainly before 1975, or in the research environment around Dervin’s original 1975 project. That is where I would look next.
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2026-08-26 Mark Park
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