Everyday life information seeking behaviour of urban homeless youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Youth homelessness, or the issue of street children, is a growing phenomenon in cities across the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa. Homeless youth, like all adolescents, deserve relevant information for successful transition to adulthood and for mastery of the challenges of homelessness. The pre-requisite for efficient provision of quality information services to any group is knowledge and understanding of their everyday life information seeking (ELIS) behaviour. The main objectives of this study of homeless youth in the market area of Accra, Ghana are to investigate their information needs, sources of information, patterns and problems encountered in information seeking and to determine how libraries and other stakeholders can meet their information needs. The study adopted the interpretive tradition and the ethnographic methodology. The field activities involved recruitment of 41 homeless youth, comprising 22 males and 19 females, ages 15 to 18 years using a snowball sampling procedure, collection of data using the critical incident technique and in-depth interviews, transcription of recorded interviews, and identification of categories and themes from participant interviews through content analysis using the NVivo qualitative data analysis software. The findings revealed eleven categories of needs comprising physiological, safety, esteem and self-actualization needs. Preferred sources of information are primarily interpersonal. Other sources are television, radio, print media and libraries. Information seeking patterns include active and passive searching, passive attention, and a heavy reliance on a social network of friends. Barriers to meeting information needs include cost, lack of education, lack of time, lack of access to relevant information and educational infrastructure, information poverty, powerlessness, and lack of confidence. iii The study is significant in many ways. It is the first study of ELIS behaviour of homeless youth in Africa. It makes a new proposition that, in an environment of limited information resources, people rely on their social networks to meet their information needs. The findings of the study add to knowledge and understanding of youth information seeking behaviour and ELIS of youth, especially homeless youth. They have implications for information dissemination and public library after-school programs and policies to facilitate provision of services and information resources for homeless youth in Ghana.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".