Intergenerational Online Health Information Searching and Brokering: Framing Health Literacy as a Family Asset

Abstract

Latino populations are disproportionately impacted by health disparities and face both connectivity and health literacy challenges. As evidenced by the current global pandemic, access to reliable online healthrelated information and the ability to apply that information is critical to achieving health equity. Through a qualitative study on how Latino families collaborate to access online health resources, this work frames health literacy as a family-level mechanism. Interviews with parent-child dyads combined with online search tasks reveal how families integrate their individual skillsets to obtain, process, and understand online information about illnesses, symptoms, and even medical diagnoses. As they engage in intergenerational online health information searching and brokering, families creatively navigate information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address a range of health needs. Bilingual children help immigrant parents obtain urgent and non-urgent health information needed to care for other family members. When children are tasked with addressing a health need critical to their parent's wellbeing, they collaborate with their parents to obtain, interpret, and apply online health information. Intergenerational online health information searching and brokering thus reveals family-level strengths that can be leveraged to promote both health and digital literacy among marginalized populations.

Seven information practices for alleviating information vulnerability

“…Much of these practices are habits as doctors often have little training in seeking information (Balicco and Pagenelli, 2011). Bilingual children of immigrants or racial minorities might conduct searches and seek information in English for their parents, serving as proxy information seekers (Gonzalez et al. , 2020).…”

Youth invisible work: the sociocultural and collaborative processes of online search and brokering between adolescents and English-language learning families

“…Conducting three separate visits also allowed us triangulation between the interviews and tasks. This study is situated in a larger investigation on immigrant Latin American families and their online search and brokering behaviors (Gonzalez et al , 2020; Pina et al , 2018; Roldan, 2021; Roldan et al , 2019). This paper provides a more focused analysis on the specifics of joint media engagement (Takeuchi and Stevens, 2011) as it pertains to family work.…”

“…In comparison to our other investigation on 24 families (Pina et al , 2018; Gonzalez et al , 2020), for this paper, we selected three focal families as case studies (Table 1). While not representative, these three focal families reflected patterns observed in other families (Pina et al , 2018).…”

“…Today, approximately 8-million US children have at least one immigrant parent who is an English-language learner (ELL) (Zong et al , 2018). Lower-SES immigrant parents often rely on their children’s language and digital literacy skills to address family needs (Gonzalez et al , 2020; Eksner and Orellana, 2012; Katz, 2014). Adults and children work together to search the internet, in a collaborative information problem-solving process we call online search and brokering (OSB) (Pina et al , 2018; Yip et al , 2016).…”

Online Health Information Seeking and eHealth Literacy Among Spanish Language–Dominant Latino Adults Receiving Care in a Community Clinic: Secondary Analysis of Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial Data

“…RenderX considerations for culture and language are a fertile area of future research examining reasons for the lack of OHI seeking (eg, learning styles and preferences, availability and access to Spanish-language computer resources, knowledge, and technological skills, such as search strategies, among others). In considering culture, previous studies exploring OHI behaviors suggested that younger, English-dominant Latino and Hispanic generations may be OHI brokers for older generations of SD Latino adults [4,35,60]. Therefore, whether OHI seeking could be facilitated by intergenerational co-learning approaches is an avenue for future exploration.…”