Abstract
Design and construction of indexing languages require thorough knowledge and understanding of the information environment. This empirical study investigated a mixed set of methods (group interviews, recollection of information needs and word association tests to collect data; content analysis and discourse analysis to analyse data) to evaluate whether these methods collected the data needed for work domain oriented thesaurus design. The findings showed that the study methods together provided the domain knowledge needed to define the role of the thesaurus and design its content and structure. The study was carried out from a person‐insituation perspective. The findings reflected the information environment and made it possible to develop a thesaurus according to the characteristics of the work domain. It seemed more difficult to capture the needs of the individual user and adapt the thesaurus to individual characteristics.