The “Had Mores”: Exploring korean immigrants’ information behavior and ICT usage when settling in the United States

Minhyang (Mia) Suh and Gary Hsieh

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2019, vol. 70, issue 1, 38-48

Abstract: The process of settling in a new country can be extremely challenging, entailing various information needs to cope with rapid changes and adjustments to a new environment. Through interviews with 16 Korean immigrants in the United States, we explored their information behaviors in the settlement process. In line with prior work (Shoham & Strauss, 2008), we found that Korean immigrants needed various types of information: housing, work, banking, transportation, law, school, health, and language. Out of these information types, the Korean immigrants prioritized information for education and struggled to seek health and legal information. We further uncovered that various information needs are closely intertwined and found an additional type of information need: to build a new social network after migration. They often used Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as information sources while adapting the ICT infrastructures of the U.S. into their information practices. ICTs enabled them to build and maintain “local” and “global” identity; however, they may struggle to assess user‐generated content in the new context. We noted that their strong use of ICTs for intraethnic interaction might slow down their integration into the host society. We discuss implications for future work to support immigrants' settlement in the host country.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24078

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:70:y:2019:i:1:p:38-48

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-1635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().