Information Behaviour and Coping Functions of Long-Term Unemployed People in Finland

Abstract

Coping with unemployment has been studied since the 1930s. Unemployed people's information behaviour, meanwhile, has only just begun to raise interest among researchers. To study both of these in order to find out whether there is a connection between unemployed people's information practices and coping functions is a whole new venture. This research is a quantitative study of coping functions and information behaviour of long-term unemployed people in Finland. The objective is to study what kind of information seeking practices long-term unemployed people have, what kind of coping functions they use to manage their life situation, and if there is a connection between their information seeking activities and coping functions. Studying their information seeking practices concentrates on everyday life information seeking and is divided into orienting and problem-specific information seeking according to the theory of Savolainen. The research material comprised 750 responses from people who had been out of work for more than a year and thus provides a good representation of Finnish long-term unemployed. The results indicate that long-term unemployed people are fairly active in their information seeking practices and use both active and passive coping functions. They also suggest that there is a connection between coping functions and information seeking practices of the long-term unemployed. It appears that high problem-focused copers are significantly more active in orienting information seeking than medium and low problem-focused copers. In problem-specific information seeking, those who use a lot of mixed-focused coping proved to be most active.