Lawmakers’ Information Literacy Skills in Locating and Accessing Information for their Constituency Performance in South West Nigeria

Abstract

Legislators are representatives of their constituencies, they initiate and monitor development projects, link their constituencies with both state and national government and generally help in improving the quality of life for members. This study set out to find out how legislators’ are able to locate and access information that may influence their performance.The survey research design was used. The population consisted of all the 177 legislators from all the six state houses of assembly in South-West Nigeria. The Cronbach’s alpha was used to validate the questionnaire which gave a reliability coefficient of 0.188. The return rate was 85.3%. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Person moment correlation and ANOVA. Findings showed that legislators (64%) had a clear understanding of the information they needed for their constituency work, as the lawmakers (65%) were able to locate and access information from current awareness sources such as newspapers and radio. Legislators (35%) also found it easy to retrieve information from community based sources such as traditional and religious leaders as well as NGOs (31%). For the hypothesis, the correlation coefficient of the information skills, abilities measured revealed that for locating and accessing information (0.18p-value<0.029) had low significant positive relationship between them and their constituency performance. The null hypothesis were therefore rejected, that is the coefficient of determination (R2) 0.188 which signified all the skills accounted for about 19% validity in the lawmakers constituency performances.