Assisting International Migrants with Everyday Information Seeking: From the Providers' Lens

TL;DR

This study explores how information providers assist international migrants in the US, highlighting challenges they face and proposing future ICT solutions to improve migrants' daily information access beyond co-national networks.

Contribution

It offers new insights into providers' perspectives on supporting migrants, emphasizing the need for ICT designs that address language, knowledge gaps, and effort calibration.

Findings

Providers use various strategies to overcome language barriers.

Knowledge disparities influence the effort providers invest.

Future ICT can enhance migrants' information access by addressing provider concerns.

Abstract

International migrants face difficulties obtaining information for a quality life and well-being in the host country. Prior research indicates that international migrants often seek information from their co-national cohort or contacts from the same country. The downside of this practice, however, is that people can end up clustering in a small-world environment, hindering the information seekers' social adaptation in the long run. In the current research, we investigated the ongoing practices and future opportunities to connect international migrants with others beyond their co-national contacts. Our work zooms in on the providers' perspectives, which complements previous studies that pay exclusive attention to the information seekers. Specifically, we conducted in-depth interviews with 21 participants assisting the needs of informational migrants in the United States. Some of these people are fellow migrants from a different home country than the information seeker, whereas the rest are domestic residents. Our data revealed how these participants dealt with language barriers, overcame knowledge disparities, and calibrated their effort commitment as information providers. Based on these findings, we discuss directions for future information and communication technologies (ICT) design that can facilitate international migrants' daily information seeking by accounting for the provider's needs and concerns.