Assisting International Migrants with Everyday Information Seeking: From the Providers' Lens

TL;DR

This study addresses how international migrants seek everyday information and how information providers can connect migrants with diverse resources beyond co-nationals. It adopts a qualitative approach, conducting in-depth interviews with 21 information providers in the United States (11 migrants, 10 domestic residents) to uncover challenges and ICT design opportunities. Key findings highlight language barriers, knowledge disparities, and differing motivational dynamics among providers, informing design directions such as careful use of language technologies, shared ground vocabularies, and teaching know-how to foster self-reliance. By foregrounding provider perspectives, the work expands Information Studies and HCI for migrant information seeking and offers actionable guidance for building sustainable ICTs that support migrants’ daily information needs and long-term adaptation.

Abstract

International migrants face difficulties obtaining information for a quality life and well-being in the host country. Prior research indicates that international migrants often seek information from their co-national cohort or contacts from the same country. The downside of this practice, however, is that people can end up clustering in a small-world environment, hindering the information seekers' social adaptation in the long run. In the current research, we investigated the ongoing practices and future opportunities to connect international migrants with others beyond their co-national contacts. Our work zooms in on the providers' perspectives, which complements previous studies that pay exclusive attention to the information seekers. Specifically, we conducted in-depth interviews with 21 participants assisting the needs of informational migrants in the United States. Some of these people are fellow migrants from a different home country than the information seeker, whereas the rest are domestic residents. Our data revealed how these participants dealt with language barriers, overcame knowledge disparities, and calibrated their effort commitment as information providers. Based on these findings, we discuss directions for future information and communication technologies (ICT) design that can facilitate international migrants' daily information seeking by accounting for the provider's needs and concerns.