Career information literacy and the decision-making behaviours of young people

The research reported in this thesis is concerned with young people’s career information literacy and information seeking for the purposes of career decision-making. The findings extend knowledge of the means by which young people in Scotland (aged 13-18) obtain career information relevant to their post-secondary career transitions. A mixed multi methods, sequential explanatory design was employed in the research. This comprised three phases of empirical data collection: a preliminary phase, a quantitative phase, and a qualitative phase. These phases entailed the use of a questionnaire, interviews, and digital diaries. The empirical work was prefaced by the analysis of secondary data held by Skills Development Scotland in which collaborative dimensions of career information seeking were established. As the first detailed account of young people’s information behaviour and use in the specific context of career decision-making, this doctoral work makes three contributions to research and theory: 1. It articulates career information seeking as a two-stage process. Within this, the practice of socially-mediated information seeking with trusted, accessible contacts – including those who ‘prompt’ information seeking – plays an important role. 2. It identifies two distinct career decision-making styles: (1) fulfilment-based; (2) pragmatic. 3. It uncovers resilience as an information literacy skill. There is one further contribution of the doctoral research: 4. It presents a set of five recommendations for the development of policy and practice to support the provision of career services in Scotland. The everyday life focus of the work, in which young people’s processes of information seeking and decision making are considered as sense-making, yields both conceptual value for library and information science research, and practical value for career guidance practice. The key contribution of the thesis is thus insight into two themes that have been overlooked in the extant body of work on information behaviour and career decision-making: career information seeking and career information literacy. Through the deployment of an interdisciplinary conceptual framework and the triangulation of its findings, the work functionally integrates facets of the information seeking process with the relevant tenets of the decision-making process to produce an understanding of young people’s sense-making in everyday life.