Modelo de valor agregado: uma análise nos serviços de informação dos observatórios sociais da Comunidade Ibero-Americana de Nações

Abstract

This research has as general objective to analyze the value-added in information services of social observatories (SO) of the Ibero-American Community of Nations. A literature review was carried out related to the main study areas involved: SO, information services and value-added, showing insufficient methodological foundations to calculate the value-added of information services. The research is characterized as qualitative and descriptive, uses observation as a data collection technique in digital environments, and qualitative content analysis as a data analysis technique. Based on a multiple case study, we analyzed 20 SO, the choice of which met three essential criteria: belonging to the Ibero-American Community, observing issues related to social development and being among the first 10 results of the simple search on Google. The methodological path of this research is composed of four stages: 1) description of the SO selected under the UN-ESCWA approach; 2) definition of qualitative variables that determine the value-added in information services; 3) analyzing of qualitative value-added variables in SO information services; and 4) construction of a value-added model for the SO information services. Among the most significant contributions of this thesis is the proposal of four metrics: a metric to calculate the Degree of Occurrence of a Value-added Variable (DO), a metric to calculate the Value-added of an Information Service (VAIS), a metric to calculate the Total Value-added of an Information Service (TVAIS) and a metric to calculate the Score of an OS (SSO). It was observed that the value-added variables '1.7-Availability', '3.1-Accuracy', '3.5-Validity' and '3.6-Authority' reached the highest degree of average occurrence among all the analyzed variables. We detected that the Reports, News and useful links, social media, Library/repository, and Essays/Journalistic articles are the information services that have the highest total value-added among the analyzed sample. We proposed a value-added model configured by two main axes: a vertical axis with the 20 defined value-added variables and another horizontal axis with the information services. At the center of our model are the proposed are the DO and VAIS metrics as basic tools for the process of calculating the value-added. The proposed value-added model has a theoretical-practical foundation, is flexible and easy to reproduce or adapt by information specialists.