Youth and Everyday-Life Information-Seeking
Ross Todd [14, p. 34], in his review of adolescent information-seeking and use, identifies three strands of research in the general area of youth information behavior: (1) school students learning through the school library, (2) children and adolescents and the World Wide Web, and (3) children and adolescents and everyday information-seeking. It is this third area that concerns how children seek and use information for meeting their developmental needs, investigating career and lifestyle choices, and building relationships with friends and family members. While of critical importance to children as they grow up, everyday-life information-seeking is by far the least studied of these three research strands. With few exceptions, these studies have focused on teenagers, a population with significantly greater autonomy and mobility than Cheap Shoes preteens and thus greater capacity for creating and using social networks that might facilitate interpersonal information behaviors. While only two of the studies elaborated on below cover youth between the ages of 9 and 13 [15, 16], we find them all significant for their approach to everyday information-seeking from the perspective of youth; in contrast, older studies tended to portray youth from the point of view of adult service providers.
In their work on Project GATE (Children’s Access to and Use of Technology Evaluation), Eliza Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Holt [15; see also 17] examined the library behaviors of preteen youth, including three focus groups with children aged 9-13, and their observations of library activity focused on technology and computer access. They found that children of this age, male and female, often choose to work together, in contrast to the “one child per computer” paradigm common in many schools and information service environments. Children’s information-seeking and information use was decidedly social, and their desire for Discount Shoes social technologies was further reinforced by the desire for face-to-face information-sharing venues. Furthermore, these researchers found that preteens’ suggestions regarding the design of information services could increase the effectiveness of information spaces, such as the public library.
Andrew Shenton and Patricia Dixon [16] found that “youngsters” of all ages turn to adults and peers for information. Conducting focus groups and interviews with 188 students aged 7-17 in a rural town in Great Britain, they revealed a typology of thirteen different information needs: advice, spontaneous “life situation” information, personal information, affective support, empathetic understanding, support for skills development, school-related subject information, interest-driven information, self-development information, preparatory information, reinterpretations and supplementations, and verification information. The study further identified that some young people take three general social types into consideration when selecting persons to consult about an information need: (1) people of convenience, (2) friends or peers of comparable experience, and (3) experts, such as teachers. Teachers and librarians were cast as negative social types by some students, who were loathe to approach them for particular information needs. Unfortunately, Shenton and Dixon’s typology fails to distinguish information needs developmentally or to enumerate qualitative differences in strategies among the developmental periods of childhood, preteen, and teen.
Studying the everyday-life needs of older youth, Denise Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell [18-20] performed semistructured group interviews with twenty-seven urban teens (aged 14-17) in two Philadelphia venues to identify their information needs, sources, and preferred media. Using Reijo Savoleinin’s [21] ELIS framework, they reported that teens identified friends and family as their preferred information sources and cell phones as their most preferred method of tool-mediated communication. Top noninterpersonal sources were the telephone, television, school, and the Internet. A typology of their needs listed schoolwork, time/date, social life, and weather as their primary information needs. Furthermore, these teens were highly skeptical of libraries and books as sources of everyday information, casting library staff as negative social types. Kathy Latrobe and William Havener [22] studied eighteen teens (16-17 years old) in an eleventh grade honors math course. Through surveys and individual interviews, they reported that teens were most in need of course-related information but that they also sought information on relationships, work, future plans, recreation, health, and lifestyles. All students reported using teachers, peers, and course-related materials to fulfill their information needs.
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