Everyday Life Information-Seeking Behavior of Marginalized Youth: A Qualitative Study of Urban Homeless Youth in Ghana

摘要

This article examines the everyday life needs, information needs, sources of information, and information-seeking behaviors of homeless youth in Accra, Ghana. Forty-one homeless youth, ages 15 to 18 years participated in this qualitative study. Participants were identified by snowball sampling and data was collected by field observations, an adaptation of the critical incident technique and in-depth interviews. The results show that (1) information needs of the homeless youth in the study relate to basic needs following Maslow's hierarchy of needs; (2) their information sources are primarily interpersonal and comparatively limited in range; and (3) the most important information-seeking behavior is a community approach, characterized by free sharing of information among their social network of friends. The results further revealed that participants relied on their social network of friends to meet 8 of the 11 information needs identified in the study. The study suggests that this behavior results from their environment of limited resources, a proposition that should be examined with further research on the everyday life information-seeking behavior of marginalized communities.