Adolescent Search Roles

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2013

In this article, we present an in-home observation and in-context research study investigating how 38 adolescents aged 14–17 search on the Internet. We present the search trends adolescents display and develop a framework of search roles that these trends help define. We compare these trends and roles to similar trends and roles found in prior work with children ages 7, 9, and 11. We use these comparisons to make recommendations to adult stakeholders such as researchers, designers, and information literacy educators about the best ways to design search tools for children and adolescents, as well as how to use the framework of searching roles to find better methods of educating youth searchers. Major findings include the seven roles of adolescent searchers, and evidence that adolescents are social in their computer use, have a greater knowledge of sources than younger children, and that adolescents are less frustrated by searching tasks than younger children. Foss, E., Hutchinson, H., Druin, A., Yip, J., Ford, W., & Golub, E. (2013). Adolescent search roles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(1), 173-189.

The current landscape of literature investigating youth Internet searching focuses mainly on how youth search in classrooms or libraries at a single point in time and highlights problems youth encounter, rather than taking an expansive view of the entire search process. This research uses a framework of searching roles, or patterns of search behavior, to provide a complete picture of how youth behave as searchers in the home environment. The searching behavior of the youth participating in this research is examined by viewing the whole searcher, where search problems are important, but equally important are factors such as affect, context, and the process of search. This longitudinal study examined participants at ages 7, 9, and 11 in 2008 to 2009 and again at ages 10 to 15 in 2012 to 2013. The searching behaviors displayed during the study's in-home interviews were analyzed according to qualitative methods that evolved throughout the research. Results of the research provide a comprehensive picture of how youth search roles and search behaviors change over time, and through case study analysis of selected participants. The research also provides in-depth description of how individuals change as searchers over time. Additionally provided is a graphic to summarize the main characteristics of search roles in youth searchers. This research concludes with recommendations to adult stakeholders such as teachers, librarians, search engine designers, researchers, and parents to aid in promoting search literacy for youth.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012

This paper presents the results of a large-scale, qualitative study conducted in the homes of children aged 7, 9, and 11 investigating internet searching processes on Google. Seven search roles, representing distinct behavior patterns displayed by children when interacting with the Google search engine, are described, including Developing Searchers, Domain-specific Searchers, Power Searchers, Nonmotivated Searchers, Distracted Searchers, Rule-bound Searchers, and Visual Searchers. Other trends are described and selected to present a view of the whole child searcher. These roles and trends are used to make recommendations to designers, researchers, educators, and parents about the directions to take when considering how to best aid children to become search literate.

Proceedings of the 28th …, 2010

Journal of Documentation, 2006

Purpose-A common criticism of research into information seeking on the internet is that information seekers are restricted by the demands of the researcher. Another criticism is that the search topics, are often imposed by the researcher, and; particularly when working with children, domain knowledge could be as important as information-seeking skills. The research reported here attempts to address both these problems. Design/methodology/approach-A total of 15 children, aged 11 to 16, were each set three "think aloud" internet searches. In the first, they were asked to recall the last time they had sought information on the internet, and to repeat the search. For the second, they were given a word, asked to interpret it, then asked to search for their interpretation. For the third, they were asked to recall the last time they had been unsuccessful in a search, and to repeat the search. While performing each task, the children were encouraged to explain their actions. Findings-The paper finds that the factors that determined a child's ability to search successfully appeared to be: the amount of experience the child had of using the internet; the amount of guidance, both from adults and from peers; and the child's ability to explore the virtual environment, and to use the tools available for so doing. Originality/value-Many of the searches performed by participants in this paper were not related to schoolwork, and so some of the search approaches differed from those taught by teachers. Instead, they evolved through exploration and exchange of ideas. Further studies of this sort could provide insights of value to designers of web environments.

Nowadays, the Internet represents a ubiquitous source of information and communication. Its central role in everyday life is reflected in the curricula of modern schools. Already in early grades, children are encouraged to search for information on-line. However, the way in which they interact with state-of-the-art search interfaces and how they explore and interpret the presented information, differs greatly from adult user behaviour. This work describes a qualitative user study in which the Web search behaviour of Dutch elementary school children was observed and classified into roles motivated by prior research in cognitive science. Building on the findings of this survey, we propose an automatic method of identifying struggling searchers in order to enable teaching personnel to provide appropriate and targeted guidance where needed.

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2014

When children search for information on a given topic, how do they go about searching for and retrieving information? What can their information seeking strategies tell us about the development of search interfaces for children's digital libraries, search engines and information repositories? We interviewed New Zealand (NZ) school children to seek insights into how they are conducting information searches during their education.

Proceedings of the …, 2009

Journal of Student Research, 2023

As technology advances, the use of social media is becoming more extensive, and many businesses are adapting their marketing plans to take advantage of it. Research has shown that individuals, especially teenagers, appear to be in-creasingly relying on social platforms like Tiktok as their primary search engine. This study aims to determine whether there is a growing number of people who use social media as their search engine. An online survey was distributed to several high school students who were asked to search for answers to questions across six different categories. The results indicate that most teenagers still use browsers and search engines like Safari, Google, or Chrome for infor-mation gathering due to their content diversity, quality, and habit. However, there was a wide variety of social media and other platforms used throughout the research, which demonstrates the potential of social media as a search engine.

ACM Transactions on the Web, 2014

The Internet is increasingly used by young children for all kinds of purposes. Nonetheless, there are not many resources especially designed for children on the Internet and most of the content online is designed for grown up users. This situation is problematic if we consider the large differences between young users and adults since their topic interests, computer skills and language capabilities evolve rapidly during the childhood. There is little research aimed at exploring and measuring the difficulties that children encounter on the Internet when searching for information and browsing for content. In the first part of this work, we employed query logs from a commercial search engine to quantify the difficulties children of different ages encounter on the Internet and to characterize the topics that they search for. We employed query metrics (e.g. the fraction of queries posed in natural language), session metrics (e.g. the fraction of abandoned sessions) and click activity (e.g. the fraction of ad clicks). The search logs were also used to retrace stages of children development. Concretely, we looked for changes in interests (e.g. the distribution of topics searched) and language development (e.g. the readability of the content accessed and the vocabulary size).