Exploring communication and sharing between extended families

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.007Get rights and content

Abstract

In recent years, computer and Internet technologies have broadened the ways that people can stay in touch. Through interviews with parents and grandparents, we examined how people use existing technologies to communicate and share with their extended family. While most of our participants expressed a desire for more communication and sharing with their extended family, many felt that an increase would realistically be difficult to achieve due to challenges such as busy schedules or extended family members’ lack of technology use. Our results also highlight the complexity of factors that researchers and designers must understand when attempting to design technology to support and enhance relationships, including trade-offs between facilitating interaction while minimizing new obligations, reducing effort without trivializing communication, and balancing awareness with privacy.

Introduction

The ability of technology to help people communicate has long been recognized, and many researchers have studied the value of technology for growing and maintaining social ties (e.g., Liechti and Ichikawa, 2000; Hindus et al., 2001; Venkatesh, 2005). In recent years, new computer and Internet technologies such as video chat, blogging software, social networking sites, and sites for sharing digital media have broadened the ways that people can stay in touch. The growing number of PC owners and Internet users in many countries (United Nations Common Database) increases the potential for people to make use of technology to stay in touch with those they care about.

Our interest lies in exploring how technology can help extended family members (people who are related, but do not live in the same household) maintain a sense of connectedness, defined by Romero et al. (2007) as a “positive emotional appraisal, characterized by a feeling of staying in touch within ongoing social relationships.” This notion of generally feeling close to one's family and friends has also been called affective awareness (Liechti and Ichikawa, 2000) and social communication (Hindus et al., 2001). There have been many concepts and prototypes developed to support connectedness between families, including awareness displays (e.g., Mynatt et al., 2001; Consolvo et al., 2004; Dey and De Guzman, 2006; Plaisant et al., 2006), media spaces (e.g., Hindus et al., 2001; Hutchinson et al., 2003), and mobile device systems (Counts and Fellheimer, 2004; Romero et al., 2007). The amount of research in this area highlights the perceived opportunity to use technology to help extended family members feel more connected.

As part of a larger research effort investigating the use of technology to support connectedness between extended families, we first sought to better understand how people currently stay in touch with their extended family members. Through interviews with 28 parents and grandparents living in the northwestern United States, we examined how people communicate with their extended family, as well as how they share photos or event information with them. We also asked our participants about the kinds of information they wanted to share, and whether they felt that their needs were being satisfied with existing technologies. The data we gathered allows us to characterize parents’ and grandparents’ current communication and sharing patterns with their extended family members, including the challenges they faced as well as other factors affecting how they communicated and shared with their extended families.

We found that while most of our participants expressed a desire to increase their level of communication or sharing with at least one extended family member, many felt that realistically, this would be difficult to achieve due to various social or technological concerns. Some of our participants expressed a sense of obligation towards interacting with their extended family, and others noted feelings of guilt or pride concerning their communication and sharing habits. Thus, while technology can help people connect with others, our results highlight the complexity of factors that researchers and designers must understand when attempting to design technology to support and enhance relationships. In particular, our findings suggest that new technology must delicately balance the assistance it provides without creating additional burdens or obligations, while at the same time being easy to use without trivializing the interaction.

Section snippets

Related work

Many research fields study the role of information and communication technology in the home; in this section, we briefly overview work related to family communication and media sharing.

Methodology

Data on communication and sharing with extended family members were collected during two studies with a total of 28 parents and grandparents. The first study was conducted in July 2006, and involved 12 participants (three mothers: M1–M3, three fathers: F1–F3, three grandmothers: GM1–GM3, and three grandfathers: GF1–GF3). A second study was conducted in May 2007 to gather more data, and involved 16 participants (five mothers: M4–M8, three fathers: F4–F6, four grandmothers: GM4–GM7, and four

Current communication and sharing results

Data from the partial family trees and communication diaries gives us a detailed description of our participants’ communication and sharing practices. From 28 partial family trees, we have data on 164 relationship pairs representing communication and sharing between a participant and an extended family member (see Table 1). From 15 communication diaries,1 we have data on 462 communication

Common communication and sharing themes

In this section, we present some of the common themes that emerged from participants’ descriptions of how they communicated and shared with their extended families.

Discussion

Most of our participants had at least one extended family member that they wanted to increase communication or sharing with. While it is possible that people over-reported wanting more interaction because they were participating in the study and several seemed to have the expectation that more communication was perceived as “good”, the extent to which people expressed an interest in additional communication and sharing suggests that there are opportunities to develop new applications and

Conclusion

Through interviews with parents and grandparents in the northwestern United States, we examined how people use existing technologies to communicate and share with their extended family. In addition to providing a detailed picture of their current communication and sharing habits, we found that although our participants were already communicating at least twice a month and sharing photos episodically, many had a desire for more communication and sharing, and seemed interested in exchanging

Acknowledgments

We thank members of the VIBE group for their participation and feedback in our pilot studies. We also thank Mark Hancock for his feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

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