Partners in life and online search: Investigating older couples collaborative information seeking

Abstract

Older adults frequently collaborate with their spouses in daily tasks and problem solving. Despite information seeking being an important aspect of collaboration, the information seeking behaviour of older adults and in particular couples remains under investigated. To address this gap, in this paper we present a qualitative investigation of older adults' collaborative information seeking. Through in-depth interviews and demonstrations of real-life search tasks with eleven older couples, we show that older couples frequently engage in collaborative information seeking in daily tasks, interests, and to satisfy curiosity. Our research suggests that collaborative information seeking is a relationship maintenance behaviour among older couples, and that their long-term relationships may play a key role in how they communicate, make decisions, and develop divide and conquer strategies by taking on various roles during their collaborative information seeking. We also found that older couples construct shared views toward technology adoption and usage despite their individual differences. We include some reflections on the existing collaborative information systems and how they may adapt to fit older couples' collaborative information seeking.