Two faculty members in Florida State’s School of Information have recently had their research published: A Failure to Connect: The Elusive Relationship between Broadband Access and Children’s Information Seeking in American Academic Research. 

Associate Professor Marcia Mardis and doctoral candidate Laura Spears conducted a study concerning children’s information seeking and broadband access. In the United States, the rate of home broadband access ranks among the worst in industrialized countries, putting Americans at a disadvantage to compete educationally and commercially in a global information economy.

“I am just thrilled to be a part of a publication that is so well respected,” said Spears. “This research demonstrates the need for increased study on the impacts of broadband access and the need for greater, interdisciplinary acceptance of failed studies that shed light on emerging and important topics.”

The study looks at the extent to which academic researchers consider their relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the US. It sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband and in the information seeking environment. The researchers conducted a mixed-method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991-2011 that reported information seeking of children 5-18 years old.

“Going into this study, we suspected that despite to centrality of the Internet to teaching, learning, and children’s out-of-school lives, it would be hard to find researchers who considered access as a part of use,” explained Mardis, the principal investigator.

The two researchers found that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals.

“This study showed that our hunch was correct and that there is a mandate for researchers to not only look at broadband presence when they study children’s behavior but also to report on this factor as well,” said Mardis. “A properly conducted study that fails, like ours, is a warning call that something important is being overlooked.”

Full Citation: Laura I. Spears & Marcia A. Mardis (2014), A Failure to Connect: The Elusive Relationship between Broadband Access and Children’s Information Seeking in American Academic Research, in Dania Bilaland Jamshid Beheshti (ed.) New Directions in Children’s and Adolescents ’Information Behavior Research (Library and Information Science, Volume 10) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.217 – 263. doi:10.1108/S1876-0562_2014_0000010056