The Information World of Parents: A Study of the Use and Understanding of Information by Parents of Young Children

Recent decades have seen change in social attitudes toward parenting within the United Kingdom. During this time, parenting has received an unprecedented amount of attention from government, through legislation and policy initiatives, as well as becoming a regular topic in the news media, television programs, and for book publishers. The consequence of this social change is that parents today, arguably, face far greater pressure in terms of sifting and weighing the wide range of messages, opinions, and information targeted at them. Despite these social changes, parents and parenting have received comparatively little attention from researchers specifically examining their information literacy needs. This article is based upon research conducted using constructivist grounded theory and examines how a group of thirty-three parents in Leeds, United Kingdom looked for, accessed, and assessed information. The primary outcome of the research is a substantive grounded theory, which is framed within five categories: being a parent (core category); connectivity; trust; picture of self; weighing. These five categories describe how parents look for, access, and weigh information on a daily basis. This theory has implications for how organizations, services, and professionals convey information to parents. It also supports the notion of a need to view information literacy as part of a complex socially constructed paradigm. Introduction The aim of this article is to provide a summary of the key findings and theory, which I developed from my research and to highlight its agreeLIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 60, No. 3, 2012 (“Information Literacy Beyond the Academy, Part II: Organizational Issues, Theoretical Perspectives, and Practical Initiatives,” edited by John Crawford), pp. 546–568. © 2012 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 547 the information world of parents/walker ment with developments in the sociocultural paradigm emerging in current information literacy research. Recent decades have seen a steady increase in the range and type of information available to British parents. Information has taken a wide range of forms and has typically included parenting books, television programs, and even newspapers (Freely, 2000), as well as the large scale penetration of the Internet into homes (Dutton & Helsper, 2007). This period has also been accompanied by an increased political interest in the family and parenting (Great Britain, 1989, 2004; HM Treasury, 2004). A consequence of these sociopolitical drivers has been an agenda that has generally been focused on decreasing inequality, increasing parental responsibility and parental choice, in addition to a range of targeted messages, for example, healthy eating advice and parenting skills (Layard & Dunn, 2009; The Children’s Society, 2006). Modern parents not only have greater access to information about parenting, through the media and the Internet, but also find themselves and their families under greater sociopolitical scrutiny (Department for Education and Skills, 2007; HM Treasury, 2003). This poses the questions: how and why do parents seek information, how do they assess it, and how do they use it? Information Literacy: Context Information literacy research has evolved from a concept ostensibly based upon a skills-based paradigm (ALA, 1989; CILIP, 2004; UNESCO, 2005). The current discourse within the information literacy community is both wide and varied (Andersen, 2006; Kurbanoglu, 2003, 2006; Lloyd, 2009, 2010; Shenton, 2009b). Notable contributions in recent years include those from Limberg (1999), who argues for a closer association between information seeking research and that of information literacy. Traditional skills-based views of information literacy have been criticized as producing “deficit models” (Lloyd, 2005, 2009) because of their perceived bias toward textual information, at the expense of considering prior learning or alternative sources of information. Bruce’s (2008) current view is not dissimilar to that of Lloyd. Bruce tries to move the concept forward with the notion of “informed learning,” the codependent relationship between information and learning. Lupton’s (2008) phenomenographic research focuses on the relationship between information and learning, suggesting a two-stage cyclical process of information and learning. Tuominene, Salvolainen, and Talja (2005) follow a similar path, emphasizing that information literacy theory should take account of sociotechnical environments, encompassing the effects of community, social collaboration, and the current digital environment. Lloyd’s (2009, 2010) sociocultural paradigm views information literacy as a catalyst in which actors, through their personal experiences, construct knowledge about a context-specific practice, which cannot be learned in548 library trends/winter 2012 dependently of its setting. Here, information literacy is constructed by an individual’s personal reflection of his/her interaction with information both subjectively and intersubjectively (Lloyd, 2010). The point of comparisons with the research present here is that Lloyd used grounded theory.