Beyond behaviors, needs, and seeking
Creators: name: Kitzie, Vanessa Lynn
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: This dissertation examines the information practices of individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+). It responds to two significant problems in current Library and Information Science (LIS) studies examining these populations. First, there exist a paucity of research studying how these individuals act toward and interact with information related to their LGBTQ+ identities. Second, extant research focuses on almost exclusively on gay and lesbian sexualities, imposing a liminal, psychological model of identity development on these actions and interactions. This imposition results in a myopic view of the unique issues, concerns, barriers, and achievements of individuals with LGBTQ+ identities, often imposed by those outside these identities.     To address these problems, this dissertation adopts a constructionist methodology, which envisions individuals as theorists within their own information worlds. A qualitative research design consisting of inductive and deductive data collection and analysis supports this methodology. Findings are triangulated by comparison between two data sources – semi-structured interviews with 30 individuals identifying as LGBTQ+ between the ages of 18 and 38, and web scraping of Question-Best Answer pairs from the LGBT thread of Yahoo! Answers. Both data sources capture participant accounts of how their information practices are shaped by sociocultural context and individual agency, as well as how online technologies, namely social media sites and search engines, afford and constrain these information practices.      Key findings advance an information practices approach, which purports the importance of sociocultural context in shaping how individuals act toward and interact with information. Employing this approach uncovers a litany of practices important to individuals with LGBTQ+ identities beyond needs, seeking, and use. Instead, practices encompass the gamut of human experience, whether such experience is produced by intersubjective understanding, or garnered by an individual’s responses to such understanding. Nor can information be considered as formal, recorded sources, passively consumed. Rather, participants’ preferred information sources are often unsanctioned, embodied, and emotional. Participants want to know what it is like to adopt an identity, fraught with visibility and questions of what constitutes authentic practice. They value information to address this need derived from their own embodied knowledge as well as from those with similar knowledge. Further, many participants need to address these desires and values within information landscapes that visibly disrupt or deny the legitimacy of their existences. Thus, envisioning a resource, such as a book as instrumental to one’s LGBTQ+ identity development only holds if supported by an individual’s sociocultural context. For these reasons, this research introduces a new lens via its conceptual framework from which to interrogate the assumptions of past research and integrate a sociocultural perspective to both information and how individuals, seek, share, use, avoid, mistrust, etcetera, information.     In terms of online technologies, research findings denote the importance of search engines and social media sites to participants when engaging in information practices related to their LGBTQ+ identities. Key affordances of online technologies include connecting participants to similar others, allowing participants to engage in embodied practices, accessing sources that do not go through formal channels of peer production, and facilitating participants’ control of what they share about their LGBTQ+ identities and to whom. Key constraints of online technologies include lacking moderation-based features, making visible strategies that erase or stigmatize LGBTQ+ identities, packaging LGBTQ+ identities into monolithic metanarratives, enforcing norms related to authenticity, and collapsing participants’ contexts. Whether these technologies represent an affordance or constraint is influenced by how a participant roots them within their own meanings and notions of relevancy. Therefore, online technologies do not provide deterministically good or bad outcomes for individuals with LGBTQ+ identities, but rather these outcomes are shaped by individual experience, sociocultural context, and the material properties of the technologies themselves.