Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

School of Information Science

First Advisor

Susan Rathbun-Grubb

Abstract

Historically, Black single mothers have played pivotal roles in their families and communities, often navigating societal systems that were not designed to include them. Systemic barriers including unemployment, wage inequality, educational inequity, and mass incarceration have contributed to a disproportionate number of Black children being raised in single-parent households, compounding the challenges Black women face when pursuing higher education. And yet Black single mothers with terminal degrees keep going — not simply despite those barriers, but through them, around them, and beyond them.

This study investigated the information behavior of Black single mothers with terminal degrees, examining how they figured out what they needed, who they trusted enough to ask, how their strategies shifted as their lives changed, and what they did with what they learned. What the findings reveal is not a story of women struggling to survive inside systems that failed them. It is a story of women who built something better beside those systems and made sure the women behind them did not have to start from scratch.

Six themes emerged, and together they tell a story of information behavior that is relational, protective, adaptive, and generative. These women did not wait for institutions to show up for them. They built their own networks, decided carefully who was safe, adjusted their strategies when life demanded it, and passed everything they learned forward. Central to that process were what this study identifies as information allies, trusted individuals who were deliberately chosen, carefully vetted, and proven safe before they were ever given access. What moved through those relationships is what this study names as information wealth, knowledge that is durable, transferable, and grows every time it moves. That wealth did not stay with one person. It traveled through information allies, passed from one trusted woman to the next, each adding to it before passing it forward, arriving across generations richer than when it left

Rights

© 2026, Kiera O'Shea

Download

Share

COinS