Small worlds in a distant land: International newcomer students' local information behaviors in unfamiliar environments

Abstract

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.

Information seeking abroad: an everyday-life study of international students

“…For immigrants, Shoham and Strauss (2008) find that the primary information needs concern banking, driving, health, housing, language, legal issues, schooling and work. Similar information needs recur in studies of international students (Oh and Butler, 2019;Sin et al, 2011;Yoon and Chung, 2017), thereby emphasizing that a sizable part of their information needs are about everyday issues.…”

“…In a longitudinal study of international students' information seeking during the initial adjustment process, Oh et al (2014) found that "survival" issues such as health and housing were more important than recreational issues. In a follow-up study, Oh and Butler (2016) found that recreational issues had become more important after the first semester abroad; survival issues remained important.…”

Coming to America: Iranians' use of Telegram for immigration information seeking

“…It may also be the case that Telegram use continues post-migration, but switches to private Groups and private messages, which we were not able to observe. Oh, et al showed how this happens for Chinese college students in the US (Oh et al , 2018; Oh and Butler, 2018, 2019), and in future work, we would like to study Iranian immigrants post-migration through a similar interview method.…”

“…For example, Chen (2018) and colleagues studied first-generation US Chinese immigrants' use of WeChat, a mobile messaging platform popular in their home country but barely known in the US. Results from several studies show that, for student immigrants, co-nationals tend to use these platforms to forge a shared identity post-migration (Oh et al , 2018; Oh and Butler, 2018, 2019; Worrall et al , 2019). Mitra and Evansluong (2019) argue that such use may, in fact, be inhibiting acculturation.…”

Cultural information needs of long-settled immigrants, their descendants and family members: use of collective and personal information sources about the home country

“…The literature calls for exploring new ways of thinking about ageing and migration and identity issues (Caidi et al, 2020). International students use social co-national information sources to seek local information (Oh and Butler, 2019). Factors that influence international students' information needs and behaviours are cultural and personal and determined by their host universities (Hertzum and Hyldeg ard, 2019).…”