Helping children cope with clinical illnesses as well as other non-clinical stressors is of great interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, and educators. Library and information science (LIS) has seldom been considered relevant to coping research or practices, although scholars have identified "information seeking" as one of children's coping strategies. The direct impact is that the role information plays in children's coping is only partially explored. For example, the focus on information seeking in coping research has limited the implications and contributions of information, because the act of seeking information is just one of the many aspects of information behaviors. Additionally, the discussions of "information seeking" in children's coping are mostly limited to clinical interventions, and so the role of information in how children cope with non-clinical issues has rarely been investigated. To fill in some of the research gaps, this study examines the role information plays in how children cope with their daily-life, non-clinical problems from an LIS perspective. For the purpose of this study, "children" refers to those who are under age 12, and "teens" and "adolescents" are used interchangeably to refer to those who are 13 to 18 years of age.

In the past two decades, library and information science (LIS) scholars such as Kuhlthau (1988) and Walter (1994) have found that children have information needs that arise from both school assignments and their personal lives, and that library services should be more responsive to their diverse needs. However, there is limited scholarship that is specifically devoted to the information behaviors of children in a more personal or social context. In LIS, research relevant to children’s information behaviors has largely focused on their learning in school (Kuhlthau, 1988, 1991), the nature of their queries—imposed or self-generated (Gross, 1995), and their use of electronic tools and the Internet for given search tasks (e.g., Marchionini, 1989; Solomon, 1993; Kafai and Bates, 1997; Hirsh, 1999; Bilal, 2000; Large and Beheshti, 2000; Agosto 2002). Youth daily-life information research is in its early stages, with most studies focusing on specific issues of adolescence such as drug use (Todd, 1999), career choice (Julien, 1999), gay coming out (Hamer, 2003), and urban teenage daily life (Agosto and Husghes-Hassell, 2006). LIS practitioners, in particular, do not have an adequate understanding of the needs and factors that influence the information behaviors of children (ages 12 and under) in the broader, daily-life, coping context. As a result, many information specialists do not consider their duties relevant to coping to any degree, and children and adolescents rarely use information institutions such as public and school libraries for their daily-life concerns. The Ohio Study (Todd and Kuhlthau, 2005), one of the largest scale surveys regarding the “helpfulness” of the school library, showed that students consider school libraries the least helpful in terms of their daily-life questions. The results of Agosto and Hughes-Hassell’s (2006) interviews with urban teens also reported that teens do not see public libraries as helpful to their daily-life information needs.

The question remains: What role does information play in children’s coping with daily-life, non-clinical concerns? In psychology literature, information seeking has been identified as one of the strategies children use in coping with clinical or medical aspects of experiences, such as venipuncture (Hodgins and Lander, 1997), dental treatment (Melamed et al., 1978; Curry and Russ, 1985), orthopedic surgery (LaMontagne et al., 1997), general medical procedures (Peterson, 1989; Hubert et al., 1988), chronic diseases (Last et al., 2007), and asthma (Ven et al., 2007). However, there has been little discussion about examining information seeking as a method children use to cope with non-medical problems. The examination of other information behaviors in this coping context is even rarer. Looking at coping from an LIS perspective may reveal other important aspects of children’s coping behaviors.

This study draws upon Wilson’s theory (2000) of “Human Information Behavior.” Wilson (2000, p. 49) defines human information behavior (HIB) as “the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking and information use. Thus, it includes face-to-face communication with others, as well as the passive reception of information, such as watching television advertisements, without any intention to act on the information given.” In other words, HIB looks at how or if one person interacts or does not interact with information in different situations. Information seeking, information use, information blunting, and other information-related behaviors all fall under HIB. Given the exploratory nature of this study, Wilson’s theory helps to examine the role information plays in various coping situations.

Another relevant, but narrower concept is Savolainen’s (1995) “Everyday Life Information Seeking” (ELIS). As its title suggests, ELIS refers to “the acquisition of various informational (both cognitive and expressive) elements which people employ to orient themselves in daily life or to solve problems not directly connected with the performance of occupational tasks” (Sovalainen, 1995, p. 266, 267). The three major elements to highlight in this short quote are: the acquisition of information (or information seeking), non-occupational problems, and problem solving. The three elements point to the goal of ELIS—“the mastery of life” (Sovalainen, 1995, p. 264) or, the activities to take care of life’s problems. This concept bears a strong resemblance to coping concepts in psychology, with the main difference between the two being the scope. While ELIS focuses on actively or passively seeking information to solve problems, coping research broadly examines efforts or strategies to “reduce anxiety and other distressing emotion states” (Folkman and Lazarus, 1991, p. 208). That said, coping literature looks at a variety of coping strategies, including information-seeking, and the goal is not necessarily that of problem-solving. More discussion regarding the relation between ELIS and coping research follows in the Stress and Coping section.

In order to explore aspects of children’s information behaviors in coping with their daily lives, the following research questions guided the investigation.

1. What information behaviors do children exhibit in coping with their daily lives?
2. What role does information play in children’s coping with daily life?
3. What factors influence children’s decision-making in the use (or lack of use) of information in coping with their daily lives?

Coping. In research on adults, coping has been defined and widely accepted as “an individual’s efforts to master demands (conditions of harm, threat, or challenge) that are appraised (or perceived) as exceeding or taxing his or her resources” (Lazarus, 1991, p.5). In studies of children’s coping, however, an increasing number of developmental researchers have pointed out that more developmental factors such as emotion regulation, attention, and coordination of motor behaviors need to be considered (Compas et al., 1997; Eisenberg et al., 1997; Skinner 1999; Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). They argue that although children and adults are exposed to many of the same stressors, their perceptions of and responses to these stressors may differ significantly, their capabilities for coping may vary greatly, and differences may exist among children of different ages (Hodgins and Lander, 1997, p. 275). Based on their arguments, these developmental scholars conceptualize coping as “regulation under stress” (Compas et al., 1997, Eisenberg et al., 1997; Skinner 1999) and view coping in a wider context. For example, Compas et al. (1997, 2001) define coping as “conscious and volitional efforts to regulate emotion, cognition, behavior, physiology, and the environment in response to stressful events or circumstances” (2001, p. 89). In accordance with developmental research, this study defines coping as including all emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal (social) responses in children to their problems.

Coping Strategy. Ways of coping or coping strategies means: “how people actually respond to stress as they contend with real-life problems” (Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007, p. 124). Strategies can be either active or passive, depending on the degree to which the person confronts the problem. Researchers have found a variety of coping strategies people use to cope with a problematic situation. In reviewing 44 studies that report on coping and coping strategies from infancy through adolescence, Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck (2007) identified 12 coping strategies that appeared most often: support-seeking (sometimes encompassing information-seeking or help-seeking); cognitive and/or behavioral escape; cognitive and/or behavioral distraction; problem-solving and instrumental action; accommodation (e.g., acceptance); opposition (e.g., blaming others); denial; self-reliance (e.g., accepting responsibility for solving the problem; self-regulation of emotions); aggression; social isolation (e.g., social withdrawal and avoiding others); negotiation (e.g., bargaining and priority-setting); helplessness (e.g., confusion); and positive cognitive reappraisal (p.126-128).

While there is no category of “information behavior” in these coping strategies, a few categories are likely to be information related. For example, “support seeking” sometimes encompasses information seeking; “problem solving” and “analyzing and intellectualizing” could involve different levels of information use; and “interpersonal help” could involve face-to-face information exchange. Information avoidance or blunting may exist in categories such as escape or distraction. Examining coping from an LIS perspective can enrich the understanding of children’s coping strategies.

Coping with Daily Life. Mildly stressful events in daily life, or what Kanner and his colleagues (1981) call “daily hassles,” are “irritating, frustrating, distressing demands that in some degree characterize everyday transactions with the environment” (p.3). Research on children’s mild stressors has been a minor trend in child psychology (Seiffge-Krenke, 1995, p, 23), studied either from a clinical view or a developmental one. In contrast to the dominant trend of the clinical approach, researchers from a developmental perspective such as Compas and his colleagues argue that given children’s limitations in terms of their biological, cognitive, and social development, the study of their coping behaviors and processes could be a new arena, different from what has been extended down from the adult coping research (Compas, 1998), and that the methods to study them could be different. Research in this area is growing, but gaps in conceptualizations and in methodology still exist. According to Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck’s (2007) review, some critical issues include: 1) the lack of a major developmental framework of coping; 2) the lack of integration of research regarding children’s reactions to stress; and 3) the lack of a more holistic examination of coping in children—“Research is typically segregated by age and is further fragmented by the kind of stressors children face, such as divorce, illness, or parental conflict” (p. 121). Although a few coping measures and scales for children have been developed, they tend to focus on the dimension of stress/coping only, and do not address individual differences in development (p. 135).

In LIS, daily life issues are being examined by ELIS scholars. The concept of “mastery of life” in Savolainen’s ELIS can probably be equated with one of the ways of “coping with minor stressors” in the psychology literature, which examines how one responds to daily-life problems in different ways, one of them being information seeking. In the past decade, in its research in the area of children and adolescents, ELIS has particularly focused on their information-seeking and needs, such as adolescent girls’ daily life information needs (Poston-Anderson and Edwards, 1993), adolescent girls’ health information utilization (Todd, 1999), children’s daily life information needs (Walter 1994), teens’ career decision making (Julien, 1999), and urban teens daily life information needs (Agosto and Hughes-Hassell, 2006). Other human information behaviors have been examined in adult groups by Chatman (1996) (i.e. her theory of nonusers in “information poverty”) and Pettigrew (1999) (i.e. her concept of “information ground” where people simultaneously exchange information in a social setting), but these theories or concepts regarding adult behaviors have not yet been extended to the study of children’s information behaviors.

More recently, one study in LIS has directly addressed the problem of assessing children’s information behavior in the daily-life coping context. By examining the interactions between librarians, children, and their primary caregivers who approached children’s librarians for coping assistance, Lu (2005, 2008) reported five major categories of information needs of children found in this daily-life coping context: Behavior (e.g., personality building, listening to the parent, etc.), Emotion (e.g., expressing anger, grief over the death of a loved one, separation anxiety, jealousy, etc.), Relationship (e.g., birth of a new sibling, adoption, divorce, friendship, blended family, etc.), Achievement (e.g., computer skills and reading skills), and Empathy (e.g., how to treat people with disabilities). Lu (2005, 2008) also found that children often displayed passive information behavior to deal with their daily-life problems. Children themselves usually did not seek out help; rather their parents or teachers sought assistance or information on the children’s behalf.

Another study that indirectly addresses information behavior in the daily-life coping context was found in teenagers’ leisure time reading (Lu and Gordon, 2007). In evaluating the learning outcomes of a high school’s summer reading program, researchers found that some teens learned to deal with existing personal problems through serendipitous leisure time reading. The students did not actively seek out help or information for the problem, but they extracted meaningful help from the books while reading. The two studies demonstrate the possibilities of studying daily-life information behaviors in the coping context. From this perspective, dimensions of information behavior can shed meaning on the coping context that members of the LIS world consider relevant or irrelevant.

Subjects and Survey Instruments. The main objective of this study is to explore children’s personal experiences and decision-making in coping with their daily-life concerns. Therefore, a qualitative research approach has been chosen. The sample consisted of 133 children, including 65 girls and 68 boys, in fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms in a public elementary school in an urban community in Taiwan. There were 52 fifth-grade (aged 11) and 81 sixth-grade (aged 12) students. Given the exploratory nature of this study, the author employed a semi-structured journal modified from Sorensen’s (1993) coping research in order to elicit children’s reports of their coping strategies as well as their coping-related decision making. Journal-keeping ensures confidentiality and privacy and provides a safer environment for disclosure and exploration of sensitive issues related to coping.

Journal items were translated and back-translated between English and Chinese, the official language in Taiwan, by a native Chinese-speaking translator. The first question was taken from Sorensen’s journal items (1993, p. 83). The investigator added Questions 2 and 3 to examine the variable of information. Participating children kept the journal in Chinese for 4 days during regular school days. The journal question protocol was tested in the pilot study and revised accordingly. The following items were included in the semi-structured journals:

1. What upset me most today was… This is what I did about it… ¹
2. I did so because…
3. Check one:
• ___ When I feel upset, I would seek information (via the Internet or in a book) to help me because ….
• ___ When I feel upset, I would not seek information (via the Internet or in a book) to help me because ….

Procedures. Children and teachers were given the semi-structured daily journals, with the following instructions 1) Children were to complete the journal items at the end of school day. 2) Teachers were not to instruct the child on his or her journal as to content or grammatical form. 3) The completion of the journal entries was voluntary. If the child was not willing or able to complete a journal entry, he could leave certain questions or the whole journal entry blank.

Data from Question 1 were coded based on Sorensen’s (1993) coping conceptualization. Sorensen’s (1993) study was among one of the few that employed a qualitative approach to examine children’s coping in daily life. Based on the semi-structured journal she developed, Sorensen (1993) was able to identify 19 coping strategies from children, including submission/endurance, problem solving, emotional expression, distraction, behavioral reframing, aggression, avoidance, rebellion, manipulation/deception, self-effacing, immobilization, emotional/sensory, thought reframing, analyzing/intellectualizing, taking personal responsibility, emotional/external focus, mother, others, friends, as well as mom and dad (Sorensen, 1993, p. 91-94). These categories were modified, added, or deleted based on the data of this study. For the purpose of this study, any information-related coping strategy was particularly examined.

Another additional variable analyzed in this study was children’s information use regarding their coping situations; that is, why they used or did not use information to cope. This variable was included to investigate aspects of children’s information behaviors in coping with daily-life issues, and was examined in Questions 2 and 3. Coding was conducted by the investigator first. A second coder coded the same data to test for consistency. The consistency was 90%. In instances of coding disagreement, the two coders discussed to reach consensus. Descriptions of categories follow in the Results section.

Findings of this study are limited by the sample. The sample was limited because participating children were from one highly homogeneous, urban community in Taiwan, and of a restricted age range, so inferences beyond this group should not be over-interpreted. Further development of similar studies might include efforts to increase diversity and representativeness.

The total number of daily journal responses from children was 532. Of these responses, 257 were from girls, and 268 were from boys. The large sample size (N=532) of this study grants the opportunity of “quantitizing” (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998, p. 126) the data. The use of quantitative analysis approaches to qualitative data is not uncommon in research studies. Researchers have found that quantitative analyses can make patterns “emerge with greater clarity” (Dey, 1993, p. 198), “extract more meaning from qualitative data” (Sandelowski, 2001, p. 231), “generate new questions or new lines of analysis” (Sandelowski, 2001, p. 233), and “complement and enhance narratives” (Olson, 2000). In this study, descriptive statistics were employed to demonstrate patterns.

Coping strategies. Sorensen’s coding response taxonomy was able to capture most of the coping strategies children reported. However, minor modifications of the taxonomy were employed in order to better represent the data of this study. Two information-related categories were found and added, including Information Seeking and Social Support—Informational. Three categories in Sorensen’s coping strategy taxonomy, Behavioral Reframing, Manipulation, and Self-Effacing, were not noted among children’s responses in this study. This may be because of cultural differences. Sorensen’s interpersonal categories (including Mothers, Others, Friends, and Mom and Dad) were regrouped into two categories, Social Support—Emotional and Social Support—Informational, in this study. Categories of coping strategies listing gender occurrence comparisons are shown in Table 1. Descriptions follow.

Submission/Endurance reflected an acceptance of the situation (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). Some examples included “wait it out,” “let it be,” and “accept it.”

Problem Solving meant the worries or stressors were confronted actively. Examples included “strategic planning to make [it] better” and “study harder [to get better grades].”

Information Seeking was considered a sub-category of Problem Solving by many psychology scholars, including Sorensen. For the purpose of this study, Information Seeking to find solutions to children’s problems was singled out.

Emotional Expression included “behavioral manifestations of feelings” (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). Most examples are emotion venting such as “I cry” and “I yell at the air.” In a few cases children just mentioned “I vented my emotions” without specifying exactly how they did it.

Distraction was used to represent doing something else to think about the issue less, to forget the issue, or to release the energy. Some frequently mentioned examples included “I read something fun to forget worries,” “I play games to switch attention,” and “I watch TV and then I’ll feel better.” A boy also mentioned “eating” as a way to help him feel better.

Aggression included “physical acts against another” (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). Typical cases included “I felt so bad that I hit my stuffed animals” and “I banged against the pillow.”

Avoidance could be cognitive or behavioral avoidance. It is different from Distraction in that the latter reflects “awareness and acknowledgment of the stressor” (Compas et al, 2001) while the former involved with pure avoidance actions such as “escape,” “walk away,” “lock myself in the room and do not think about it,” “sleep,” and “close my eyes and think of nothing.”

Rebellion referred to a refusal to comply with the reported stressor (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). For example, one boy in his journal mentioned that his academic performance upset him, so he “didn’t do the homework.”

Immobilization represented responses where the child reported “being unable to act or think” (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). Emotional/Sensory strategies were “expressions of feelings within… with no apparent associated behavioral activities” (Sorensen, 1993, p. 93). Children’s expressions included “I feel bored,” “depressed,” “tired,” “anxious,” “worried,” “scared,” and “alone.”

Thought Reframing as a coping strategy involved with cognitive restructuring. “Thinking of [it] in another way” was a typical response under this category.

Analyzing/Intellectualizing coping strategies were “cognitive problem-focused attempts at problem solving” (Sorensen, 1993, p. 94). Thinking, strategic planning, and “trying to understand” were some typical responses.

Taking Personal Responsibility contained self-focusing activities, such as self-blame and apologizing (Sorensen, 1993, p. 94). Children’s responses included “I blame myself,” “I cursed myself,” and “I felt guilty.”

Emotional/External Focus included wishful thinking and praying. For example, a girl in her journal wrote “I prayed it wouldn’t rain during the fieldtrip.”

Seeking emotional support and comfort from others was put under the category of “Social Support--Emotional.” In this study, children sought social support from parent(s), teachers, friends, siblings, and unspecified others.

Children who sought advice or information from others were put into another new category, “Social Support—Informational.” In this study, children sought informational support and advice from parent(s), teachers, friends, siblings, and unspecified others.

Children’s report of information-seeking to cope with daily life is not high: only 28 out of the 532 responses (5.26%) reported information-seeking. Among the 28 cases, 3 looked for information from text materials such as the internet and the newspaper; the remainder sought for instrumental advice or information from interpersonal sources. (Table 2)

Decision-Making. Children’s decision-making factors in coping strategies were gathered from the second question in their journals: “I did so because…” The goal of this question was to examine factors that influenced children’s use of coping strategies, including information seeking. Factors that impact children’s decision-making in their coping strategies varied. Thirteen categories evolved from this study. Many of the decision-making factors were straightforward and coincided with children’s coping strategies. More information behaviors were found from this question. Brief descriptions of the categories follow. Taxonomy here was based upon the author’s coding and analysis. (Table 3)

Self-Reliance was found in cases where the child relied on his own capabilities or judgment. For example, “I think, because I am good at [thinking]” or “I can solve [it] on my own.”

Problem Solving was found in cases where the child chose to use certain coping strategies to solve the problem. For example, “I reduce the price to get better sale [for fund raising]” or “I go online to look for solutions.”

Information Seeking to Analyze referred to cases where the child sought information to help him or her understand the encountered problem. The goal here was not to directly solve the problem, but to obtain more understanding in order to proceed. A typical example was “I look for information to get a better idea of what else I can do”

Mood Changing referred to the use of certain coping strategies in order to “feel better/happier,” “to change mood,” or “to relax.”

Emotion Venting was found in cases such as “I yell so I can vent my emotions” or “I draw wildly to vent.”

Escaping consisted of a wide range of disengagement, from distraction to avoidance and further to try to forget. A typical response was from a girl, who wrote “I call my friend because she can help me escape from the darkness.”

A few children reported they used certain coping strategies to kill time. For example, “I read to kill time.”

Children also chose to use certain coping strategies because of a sense of “lack of control.” They revealed helplessness or expressed negative feelings or emotions. Examples included “I hit things because I’m in a bad mood, “I am just upset,” or “I don’t know what to do.”

Transition: A small number of children reported they used certain coping strategies because they “need a break” or need to “calm down.” Some examples included “I read a book to calm me down,” “I try to forget the worry so that I can calm down and face it later,” and “I sleep because I need a break.”

Some children reported they used certain coping strategies for no particular reasons—“I just like it,” “it’s my hobby,” or “it’s fun.”

Children also used certain coping strategies because of convenience. For example, a girl wrote “I talk to my friend because it’s convenient.”

Children also used certain coping strategies because of their personal belief. It is not necessarily their hobby or the thing they like, but rather their personal beliefs or attitudes that direct them to such decisions. For example, a boy wrote “I eat beef. It is delicious and gives me positive energy.” Another boy wrote “I go out to have some fun because it’s not healthy to think too long.”

While cross-examining children’s coping strategies and their decision-making factors, three additional coping information behaviors emerged: Information Seeking for Problem Analysis, Information Use for Escape, and Information Use as a Transition.

Sometimes children sought information in order to analyze the encountered problems. The goal is not necessarily to solve the problem as emphasized in psychology literature, but to better understand the problem. This may, or may not, lead to problem solving. Information Use to Escape is the use of information to escape from the encountered problems. In this study, quite a few children mentioned reading novels or comic books as a way of coping because “it helps [me] escape from the reality” or “so I don’t have to think about other things.” A small number of children mentioned the use of the internet as a way of escape: “I just browse online [because] it can distract me,” or “I go online to kill time.” Information Use as a Transition was found when children used information, oftentimes through reading a book, in order to temporarily disengage themselves from the current worries. The strategy served as a transition or a bridge to potential problem solving. Children in these cases reported reading to calm them down so that they may face the problem later. For example, a girl wrote that “I read funny stories [because] I can change mood and face the problem better later.”

Information Use and Coping. The last question in the journal was a hypothetical one: Would you use information (specifically via reading books or going online) when you are upset; why or why not? 60.82 percent of the responses reported affirmatively, 36.89 percent would not, and 2.28 percent did not comment on this question.

Among the information-users, 14.79 percent of information-seekers did not comment on their decision-making factors. The top four reasons for their information use in the coping context were “mood changing,” “problem solving,” “disengagement,” and “just like it.” (Table 4)

Reasons for information non-users varied. 11.57 percent did not comment on their information non-use. Top four reasons for their information non-use in a coping context were “Uselessness,” “Using other distraction activities” (e.g. drawing, running, singing, etc.), “Too much trouble,” and “Just don’t like it.” (Table 5)

One of the major findings from this question is the behavior of Information Avoidance. In dealing with daily-life worries and concerns, sometimes children do not want to use information at all. They gave a variety of reasons such as “it’s useless,” “[it is] too much trouble,” “[it is] too time-consuming,” and “[I] simply don’t want to.” In a few cases, children expressed that they did not want to know and use the information because it would “worsen the situation.” This type of information behavior is similar to Miller’s (1987) “information blunting” in clinical treatment, where some cancer patients chose not to deal with “threatening information” (p. 345).

In psychology literature, information seeking as a coping strategy is the only information behavior being examined, dominantly in clinical cases. Findings of this study revealed that children’s use of information in coping with daily-life issues is multi-faceted. Information seeking is not the only component in addressing daily-life coping. At least five different types of coping information behaviors were found in this study.

Information seeking for problem solving. Children actively sought particular information or advice from books, from the Internet, and from their interpersonal relationships to solve problems. It resembled Savolenein’s ELIS in that children sought various information and advice to solve their daily-life problems. In these cases, children revealed physical (or external) behaviors in information seeking and coping.

Information seeking for problem analysis. This type of information behavior focused more on children’s cognitive behaviors in information and coping. Children actively sought additional information from books, the Internet, or from their interpersonal relationships to better understand the encountered problem or to plan strategically.

Information use for a transition. Instead of seeking information, children use information, oftentimes through reading books, in order to temporarily disengage themselves from the current worries with an apparent goal to cognition restructuring. The strategy served as a transition or a bridge to potential problem solving. Children in these cases reported reading to calm them down so that they may face the problem later. How they selected these books or information, however, is unknown.

Information use for escape. Some children mentioned they read a variety of materials in order to escape from or to forget worries. In such cases, the goal of the information use was simply to not to face or think about the problems at all. Again, the book or information selection process is not known.

Information avoidance. In dealing with daily-life worries and concerns, sometimes children do not want to use information at all for a variety of reasons.

This study on children’s information behavior in coping with daily-life is exploratory work which provides insights into methodology issues while opening many questions for investigation. Research on coping information behaviors requires methods for exploring new issues combined with methods for testing and verifying findings. In coping literature, coping has been studied predominantly by examining the relations or correlations between stressors and coping strategies in order to gauge appropriate interventions. However, coping behavior is not simply a snapshot of reaction to a stressor. Instead, coping is a process in which “people might try one strategy but change to another on the basis of feedback about its consequences” (Lazarus, 1993, p. 238). In other words, coping is a process that involves adaption and decision-making, which could be influenced by various factors such as emotions, cultures, and social settings. In this study, the problem-strategy dimension question, which is the typical factor analysis investigation approach in coping literature, was only able to solicit two types of coping information behaviors among children: Information Seeking for Problem Solving and Social Support—Informational. However, when the dimension was expanded to examine children’s rationale behind their coping strategies, more coping information behaviors emerged. The approach used in this study points to the need to examine coping beyond a traditional stress/coping measure research scheme. An LIS perspective appears to be a valid one that enriches the understanding of coping behaviors.

The basic research question of why children use or do not use information to cope with daily life, which is addressed in this work, produces findings that also have practical applications for professional practice of intervention and service design. Following are some issues needing further study.

Additional exploration of coping information behaviors among children is needed— particularly examination and comparison across cultures. This study took place in a non-Anglophonic culture, where children may respond to stressors or difficult problems differently than those in an Anglophonic one, as a result of their cultural backgrounds. Their perceptions of stressors, their responses to different challenges, and the perceptions they have regarding “information” could be very different.

In this study, nearly 2/3 of the children reported they would use information in coping with daily-life challenges although they might use information for a variety of reasons. This finding is revealing in that it indicates information is not only relevant but important to children’s daily-life coping. It would be helpful for information specialists to reexamine their duties and responsibilities in another context—to provide information or reading as a coping tool and not just as an educational or recreational device.

The coping information behaviors found in this study point to the need to examine what children’s information needs are in coping with daily life. A need must satisfy some goal or purpose (Green 1990). Findings of this study revealed a wide range of children’s goals in coping with their daily lives, from confrontation (problem solving) to escape or denial. Because children aimed at different goals, the type of information they needed varied. When a child looked for information to solve his problem, information on that specific topic was what he needed. This is the typical problem-need equation in many LIS studies. However, problem confrontation was not always the child’s goal, and so information about that topic was not necessarily what the child needed. When a child wanted to calm down first and face the problem later, the information he needed could be anything that attracted his attention at that moment. When a child wanted to escape from the worry, the information he needed would be anything but that topic. That is, children’s information needs in coping with daily lives appeared to be contextualized, and so theme- or subject-based information services may not be helpful. New concepts in information and collection classification, service design, and information retrieval need to be explored. It would be challenging, for example, to provide children easy access to information or books that may help change their moods. Children’s book- or information-selection criteria in order to escape or to calm down are another topic that deserves further investigation.

The central idea of this study is to explore children’s information behaviors in coping with their daily-life problems. In coping literature, information-seeking is the only information-related coping strategy being examined, oftentimes in conjunction with the treatment of clinical illness. Information behaviors, however, are not limited to information seeking in a clinical context. Findings of this study have revealed some information behaviors that are unrecognized in current coping literature and offer a broader perspective to look at the roles information plays in coping.

This study is unique in that it goes beyond the typical stress/coping investigation scheme to examine children’s use or lack-of-use of information in coping with their daily-life problems and the rationale behind their coping strategies, which provides a more meaningful context for their information needs. Providing relevant information to meet the child’s goal in coping, no matter whether it is for problem-solving, for escape, or for a transition to move on, is but one task information specialists do to meet patron’s information need.