Culture Sensitivity and Information Access: A Qualitative Study among Ethnic Groups

Abstract

Fairness has been touted as one of the most important issues for responsible AI as sophisticated AI-powered systems increasingly impact human lives. At the same time, access to information is essential in today’s knowledge economy and fundamental to American democracy. However, certain groups of the population might be excluded or lack access to participate fully in public discourse/economy because their cultural background presents obstacles to accessing or comprehending uniformly disseminated information without consideration of cultural relevance. The current study is the first study of a large research project on AI fairness and information access designed to explore how different minority groups perceive their information access needs and how cultural factors might shape their information access experiences. Data was collected through 49 comprehensive interviews conducted with a variety of ethnic groups. Thematic analysis technique and NVivo 12 plus were used to analyze data. Findings revealed that while ethnic users can identify several challenges and issues regarding their information access, they either do not realize or cannot explicitly articulate how their ethnic backgrounds or cultural factors would shape their information access experiences.