How Preteens Experience Information-seeking?

By Author: Mike Jones
Total Articles: 256

Key themes running across Chatman's body of work include social types, social norms, and worldview. We hypothesized that the small worlds concept together with the theory of normative behavior would best fit or help in Juicy Couture Necklaces our understanding of the everyday information lives of tweens. Our working expectation was that the tweens occupied or lived in small worlds in which information-seeking was essentially viewed as a healthy activity by its members the tweens, their families, peers, teachers, and others.

The general principles of information-seeking described by Harris and Dewdney [42] and Case [43] were particularly useful for designing the data collection instruments and data analysis, albeit with the caveat that they were largely drawn from research on adult populations. In Barriers to Information [42, pp. 20-27], Harris and Dewdney integrated previous research to develop six general principles of information-seeking behavior. They interpreted these generalizations to apply to "ordinary" people, of which we would include tweens. The principles are these:
1. Information needs arise from the help-seeker's situation.
2. The decision to seek help or not seek help is affected by many factors.
3. People tend to seek information that is most accessible.
4. People tend to first seek help or information from interpersonal
sources, especially from people like themselves.
5. Information-seekers expect emotional support.
6. People follow habitual patterns in seeking information.
We integrated these principles with the "lessons" derived from Case [43] in his extensive survey of Juicy Couture Jewellery information needs, seeking, and use research. Thus, an aim of the current study was to learn whether the principles we draw from the research of adult information behavior were relevant to the tween population.

Recognizing that information-seeking is a complex phenomenon involving interplay of personal and contextual variables, the researchers developed the following research questions (RQs) to guide the study: RQ 1: What types of everyday information do tweens perceive them selves as needing? RQ 2: How do tweens seek everyday information? RQ 3: What barriers do tweens encounter in seeking and using information? RQ 4: How do tweens manage their accumulated everyday information. RQ 5: What criteria do tweens use in assessing and sharing information and information sources? RQ 6: What roles are played by different social types regarding information flow. RQ 7: What are the roles of information grounds in tweens' lives. The research questions were wide-ranging and inclusive but consistent with prior research on everyday-life information-seeking and information grounds [41-43]. The researchers sought to gather information that would expand our understanding of how preteens experience information-seeking, including processes, outcomes, and affective dimensions.