The Information Behavior of Mothers: Instinct as Information

Abstract

Previous research on the information-seeking behaviour of parents is extremely narrow in scope, focusing on parents whose children have medical or psychological concerns. This research hopes to share the information-seeking behaviours of a broader population, parents of adolescents (children between 10-19 years old). Using the Information Horizon Method (Sonnenwald 1999), this research project incorporates semi-structured interviews with three mothers who currently have two adolescent children each. The interviews contained neutral questions regarding information resources used by parents when determining general information regarding their children’s lives. The findings show that there is a great preference for interpersonal resources, with the most attended to and preferred ones being the resources inside the home, which include spouse, the child, or the child’s sibling. It is only if they are not satisfied with the information gathered from those resources that the parents would go outside the home, at which point the resources are chosen based on the situation. Certain resources that parents are attempting to have in their information horizon are social media and internet use. Parents use different techniques to access information on their children’s social media accounts or look at friends’ private profiles. They also incorporate techniques with computers in general, such as allowing them only in open spaces, where parents are able to quickly glance at screens. Lastly, all parents depicted an indescribable embodied knowledge that concerned the state of their children. This intuition was the starting point of all information-seeking processes depicted in this research project. They called this intuition maternal instinct.