Exploring youth information-seeking behaviour and mobile technologies through a secondary analysis of qualitative data

This paper examines issues associated with secondary analysis of qualitative data and their implications for information behaviour scholarship. Secondary data analysis poses a range of potential challenges for data creators, but also opportunities, including the ability to expand theory to a wider context, strengthen the reliability and validity of existing theory, gain access to populations that may be difficult to access, and to promote data archiving. The paper uses as a case study of secondary data analysis the results from our re-examination of data gathered previously in the European Union project Net Children Go Mobile, drawing from the interview transcripts from the 34 children in the UK data set. Our approach to secondary analysis was reanalysis, applying a new interpretive lens to the data that necessitated new questions in order to reveal hidden layers in the data. The data was analysed for evidence of information behaviour in order to understand how mobile technologies may be changing the way that young people seek and use information. The reanalysis of the data set supported existing models of information behaviour but revealed new ways of information seeking based on the affordances of screen size and data plans.

"young people do not feel it necessary to distinguish between task, purpose and the associated technical tool when it comes to online information systems in a mobile world. This may be problematic if young people cannot contextualize their online behaviour nor understand the affordances and purposes of particular technologies and applications. Can they, for example, distinguish between credible news sources and some of the content on Facebook that masquerades as news? Second, the findings point to the need to design mobile information systems for young people that account for this blending of social media and other interactive ICT systems." (Bowler et al, 2018: 326). "In our analysis, we saw credibility take on a new meaning in the context of mobile, digital information. Teens are thinking seriously about the trustworthiness of the container of the information, the digital infrastructure that holds the information, rather than the value of the informational content. In pre-digital times, information users rarely considered the quality of the container that held the information. Books, once printed and bound, were not expected to change their fundamental shape nor harm the user. However, in the age of digital content, the calculation changes. Our analysis revealed a perspective on credibility focused on the risks associated with malware and viruses, considerations related to software, rather than to the inherent value of the content." (Bowler et al, 2018: 328).