How Latino Children in the U.S. Engage in Collaborative Online Information Problem Solving with their Families

Approximately 8 million U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent. Lower-socioeconomic (SES) immigrant parents often rely on their children’s language skills to problem-solve family needs—a practice known as brokering. Yet it is unknown how children use their language and digital literacy skills to search and broker information online. This paper examines how children with lower-SES immigrant parents search and broker information online. We focused on Latino families as they are the fastest growing U.S. minority group. We conducted in-home interviews and observations of search tasks with 23 parent-child dyads. We demonstrate: (1) how Online Search and Brokering (OSB) is impacted by familial values and resources at an individual, family, community, and digital infrastructure level, and (2) through search vignettes, how parent-child dyads problem-solve family needs through OSB. Our work demonstrates a different purpose of technology use in families: intergenerational, bilingual, and online co-searching to problem-solve family needs.