This paper presents the findings from a project about how international students seek and acquire information during their settlement in an unknown geo‐spatial environment. Through semi‐structured interviews, questionnaires, and cognitive mapping with twenty international students, this study examines their information needs, information sources, and settlement experiences in the host country. Findings of the study include their (1) focus on acquiring basic, survival‐related information; (2) active use of internet‐based information sources including online/mobile maps; (3) information behavior of wandering around and information encountering; (4) co‐national social networks playing a key role as information sources. Implications are discussed in ways to further our understanding of international students’ information behavior and promote its improvement.

This work‐in‐progress paper reports preliminary analysis of an online survey of 224 university students (undergraduate or graduate), examining their help‐seeking behavior, information needs, information‐seeking behavior, and information‐seeking satisfaction when experiencing stress, anxiety, or depression symptoms. Information on the Internet was the most commonly used source of help and information. While most demonstrated at least mild mental illness symptoms, students were inclined to seek information around self‐help/care rather than around professional help. This study extends information behavior research to the mental health context, and our future analyses will assess how students’ information behavior relates to their psychological and sociodemographic factors.

Background Although the use of patient-generated data (PGD) in the optimization of patient care shows great promise, little is known about whether patients who track their PGD necessarily share the data with their clinicians. Meanwhile, health literacy—an important construct that captures an individual’s ability to manage their health and to engage with their health care providers—has often been neglected in prior studies focused on PGD tracking and sharing. To leverage the full potential of PGD, it is necessary to bridge the gap between patients’ data tracking and data sharing practices by first understanding the interrelationships between these practices and the factors contributing to these practices. Objective This study aims to systematically examine the interrelationships between PGD tracking practices, data sharing practices, and health literacy among individual patients. Methods We surveyed 109 patients at the time they met with a clinician at a university health center, unlike prior research that often examined patients’ retrospective experience after some time had passed since their clinic visit. The survey consisted of 39 questions asking patients about their PGD tracking and sharing practices based on their current clinical encounter. The survey also contained questions related to the participants’ health literacy. All the participants completed the survey on a tablet device. The onsite survey study enabled us to collect ecologically valid data based on patients’ immediate experiences situated within their clinic visit. Results We found no evidence that tracking PGD was related to self-reports of having sufficient information to manage one’s health; however, the number of data types participants tracked positively related to their self-assessed ability to actively engage with health care providers. Participants’ data tracking practices and their health literacy did not relate to their data sharing practices; however, their ability to engage with health care providers positively related to their willingness to share their data with clinicians in the future. Participants reported several benefits of, and barriers to, sharing their PGD with clinicians. Conclusions Although tracking PGD could help patients better engage with health care providers, it may not provide patients with sufficient information to manage their health. The gaps between tracking and sharing PGD with health care providers call for efforts to inform patients of how their data relate to their health and to facilitate efficient clinician-patient communication. To realize the full potential of PGD and to promote individuals’ health literacy, empowering patients to effectively track and share their PGD is important—both technologies and health care providers can play important roles.

International students face various challenges in their new countries, but research is less clear about their challenges in information behaviors. This article fills this gap by examining information behaviors of international newcomer students during adjustment to local environments, that is, local information behavior (LIB). Drawing on prior work, we focus on the local co‐national context—the degree to which there are co‐nationals available in one's local environments—to analyze the LIBs of 149 first‐year graduate students and 57 follow‐up interviewees, who were classified into: International‐common group (students from China, India, and Korea—with many local co‐nationals), International‐less‐common group (students from other countries—with fewer local co‐nationals), and Domestic‐out‐of‐state group (students from other U.S. states; control group). We identify differences in international newcomer students' use of information sources during adjustment and the role that local co‐national contexts play in these differences. These results suggest ways that information scholars and practitioners might account for the influences of local co‐national contexts when examining information behaviors of internationally mobile students and designing systems and services for newcomers from around the world.

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