A Rutgers study examining how vehicle residents utilize different information resources to support their daily lives has found that while they encounter challenges surrounding access instability, they also encounter an additional layer of difficulty due to their physical movements.

The study, “What happens next? The ever-dreaded “knock” and mobile access instability for vehicle residents” by SC&I doctoral student Kaitlin Montague, was published in the journal Mobile Media & Communication. 

“In this paper, I introduce the concept of mobile access instability to refer to voluntary and coerced movements of vehicle residents that continually reshape their digital access,” Montague said. “Policy and law enforcement push vehicle residents to the margins (vehicle residents quickly learn to dread the ‘knocks’ on their windows when the police ask them to move), out of Internet and cellular service range, which results in information inequities and barriers to critical information to support their everyday lives. Conversely, there is some level of voluntary mobility involved in the resolution of access instability when vehicle residents choose to return to cellular service range to regain accessibility and fulfill their information needs. Born out of these factors are the vehicle residents on which this study is based.”

“In this paper, I introduce the concept of mobile access instability to refer to voluntary and coerced movements of vehicle residents that continually reshape their digital access,” Montague said.

While vehicle residents are employed, own phones, pay for internet connections and have unlimited data plans, they still face the usual issues related to access instability: maintaining mobile connectivity and interruptions in access; the confiscation or theft of a device resulting in a loss of addressability and connectivity; and lastly, the inability to maintain a charged device.

Further, this study shows that their physical, geographic movements in and out of cellular and Internet range present additional critical barriers to their efforts to access legal, social service, employment, or government information and this lack of access can impact their hopes for working their way out of financial precarity. All of the participants Montague interviewed for this study used their mobile devices and relied on stable connections to communicate with employers or obtain gig economy work through apps like Task Rabbit.

Montague said she found that vehicle residents generally move in two ways: they move in ways that create access instability (usually forced mobility via policy and law enforcement), but they also move in ways to temporarily resolve access instability (usually voluntary mobility).

To address the information-seeking practices and access contingencies of vehicle residency, Montague said she conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews and guided tours with seven vehicle residents living in the U.S. The inclusion criteria for the study population included people who, due to financial strain, chose (or had been forced) to pare down their belongings to move into their vehicle. Additional inclusion criteria included earning wages and living in a functioning vehicle for at least 6 consecutive months prior to the interviews.

This study shows that the physical, geographic movements vehicle residents make in and out of cellular and Internet range present additional critical barriers to their efforts to access legal, social service, employment, or government information and this lack of access can impact their hopes for working their way out of financial precarity.

“Vehicle residents’ unique needs have been understudied by scholars and unaddressed by policymakers,” Montague said. “Therefore, future directions will include: understanding the nature of these unique information deficits; understanding how vehicle dwellers respond to and navigate them; and understanding what must be done at the structural level to ameliorate some of these inequalities.”

These findings have critical implications for both policy and scholarly research on mobile communication technologies and the unstably housed, Montague added.

“Investigating vehicle residents from an information access perspective is an innovative concept and that can shift the development of social policy by offering research-based assistance to highlight the information resources that this population uses while also identifying gaps where services can be created. Information access feels like it should be a human right so long as the public library is the last free place where anyone can simply be without making a purchase. Results from this study serve as a call to break the proverbial chain of criminalizing the unstably housed who exist in a system that was never created for their success,” Montague said.

Learn more about the Ph.D. Program at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.