Exploring Doctoral Student Mothers’ Mobile Device Use for Studying and Parenting

One in five U.S. college students is a student parent, of which roughly 2.7 million are student mothers. Student mothers’ success in academic pursuits was at a higher risk of attrition than almost any other group of U.S. students. This situation raises the need for discretionary educational policies among traditional and nontraditional students. Mothers pursuing doctoral degrees, in particular, face challenges in their dual roles as academic scholars and primary caretakers. Researching doctoral student mothers’ mobile device use is important, considering this group is likely to be in their peak childbearing years and in response to the increasing use of mobile devices in studying and parenting. This study aims to explore LIS doctoral student mothers’ perceptions, experiences, and mobile device use for studying and parenting by applying the concurrent triangulation approach in mixed methods research. Twelve transcripts from online interviews with twelve doctoral student mothers were analyzed using NVivo15, resulting in six themes: motivation and persistence, support systems, perception of use, academic use, use in parenting, key challenges and benefits. Furthermore, 49 pings were signalled on each student mother’s mobile device, resulting in 316 completed surveys (53,74% response rate). After removing PII, the survey results were analyzed using the Airtable platform to create a dashboard to present four common attributes found in an ESM study, including context, social, activity and experience (as they occur). The study contributes to promoting research involving human-computer interaction on an everyday basis to bring further application of the experience sampling method into the LIS discipline.