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.