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Investigating Information Poverty and its Implications for Community Development
Frank Sligo and Jocelyn Williams
Department of Communication and Journalism, Massey University, Palmerston North, and School of Communication, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
Contact Email: F.Sligo
massey.ac.nz
The social implications of disparate access to information in communities are poorly understood, and the relationship between information poverty and other forms of social disadvantage is also unclear.
We attempted to determine dimensions of information poverty in extended interviews with 20 low socio-economic status (SES) persons in Auckland, New Zealand, in a test of Elfreda Chatman’s six-proposition model. We found that the dimensions of information poverty take different shapes depending on the community in which they appear. We argue that information richness is an easier concept to define than information poverty, because definitions of the former usually focus on characteristics of the individual rather than the characteristics of community. In contrast, information poverty is to us more a description of an “individual in community” than of an individual alone. Our research supported US findings that information poor people engaged in self-protective behaviour by avoiding exposing their true problems and that they practised selective introduction of new knowledge. Others of our findings were at odds with recent US research in that the New Zealand respondents did not perceive themselves as devoid of social support; class distinction and privileged access to information were less salient; and secrecy and deception largely did not feature in respondents’ behaviour. We explore some social policy implications of these findings.
Paper
Download Information (if available):
Paper196.doc
Copyright
© 2001 Social Policy Research Centre.
