Peer Reviewed

Social media offers an alternative source for entrepreneurs to expand their social networks and obtain relevant resources to support their ambitions. Aspiring entrepreneurs with limited access to resources and social networks might rely more on the opportunities that social media tools offer. Aspiring entrepreneurs navigate social media to realize their economic dreams. Yet, those who face financial constraints often face challenges. Because aspiring entrepreneurs are transitioning to entrepreneurship, they must construct and even adapt to new work-role identities and new requisite skills, behaviors, attitudes, and patterns of interactions. In a re-analysis of a sub-sample of data from two empirical studies, this work examines how aspiring entrepreneurs living in a financially-constrained environment seek informational, social, and emotional support online and navigate their transition to entrepreneurship. These entrepreneurs obtained informational and emotional resources from observing other members' posts in online communities, including the next steps needed to adapt to their desired small business work roles. However, few publicly disclosed their informational or emotional needs online. We extend existing research on financially-constrained entrepreneurs' use of social media, contributing insights into how these resource-seeking practices limit their exploration of alternative entrepreneurial identities and feedback. We also contribute design implications to facilitate their online disclosure practices, including offering suggestions about ways to respond to questions and other disclosures in ways that restore trust and mitigate identity threats.

Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.

Online employment resources are now as important as offline personal and professional networks, which have been pivotal in finding employment. However, it is unclear, which specific online resources are key to employment and how job seekers take advantage of them. Therefore, in an online survey of 768 job seekers, we investigated which online platforms, specific job search phases, behaviors, and job search strategies job seekers used in their job search, and which of these were associated with positive outcomes. We examined whether these results correlated with demographic factors and found differences in online platform use among income, gender, years of education, and race. Our results suggest that higher-income job seekers were more likely to use different strategies and more likely to get callbacks than lower-income job seekers. We raise new questions around demographics and technology and discuss the need for practitioners to design for a wider variety of job seekers.

Social media platforms provide access to informational and emotional resources that can enable low-income populations to further their socioeconomic mobility and cope with unexpected life demands. However, lack of both interpersonal trust and a sense of shared identity often prevent low-income individuals from eliciting resources from the diverse networks embedded in these platforms. Building on past research, we investigated factors that facilitated and deterred low-income members of the community-based non-profit organization Family Independence Initiative (FII) from seeking informational and emotional support from other members on the organization's social media platform, UpTogether. We found that despite participants' perceived shared identity, members primarily requested resources from other UpTogether members through offline interactions due to lack of interpersonal trust. We extend existing research on the limitations of shared identity and the role of interpersonal trust and social norms in facilitating resource-seeking interactions among strangers in low-income contexts. We suggest that social media platforms incorporate pseudonymous posting to facilitate relationship development and allow users to disclose their needs without revealing identifying information.

In this paper, we describe how people perceive the use of social media to support crime prevention in their communities. Based on survey and interview data from residents in high- and low-crime neighborhoods in Chicago, we found that African Americans, people from high-crime neighborhoods, and people with low levels of trust in local police are less likely to view social media as an appropriate tool to support citizens or the police in local crime prevention efforts. Residents' concerns include information getting into the wrong hands, trolls, and being perceived as a snitch. Despite concerns with usage, citizens also viewed social media as a tool that can supplement in-person crime prevention efforts and facilitate relationship-building and information sharing. We discuss the complexities of hyper-local usage of social media to combat crime by describing the social and historical contexts in which these tools exist.