skip to main content
10.1145/3584931.3608922acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
abstract
Public Access

Data Advocacy for Visibility of Home Care Workers

Published: 14 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Technology solutions have been proposed to address the “care gap” that the United States has been facing due to the increasing demand for home and community based services that far exceeds the supply of caregivers. However, these technology solutions do not fully address the crux of the crisis—the poor working conditions of home care workers (HCWs). Rather, these technology solutions further burden, invisibilize, and surveil workers. My research challenges this dynamic by proposing the design of technology that can be used to advocate for the workers, amplifying their voices and highlighting their work. In this paper, I describe the three phases of my research where I: (1) examine the relationship between visibility and technology, (2) explore different design approaches to see how technology could complicate questions of visibility, and (3) build and deploy a system to evaluate how data could be used for advocacy. Helping workers collect and share data could build awareness and solidarity, expose employer violations and uncompensated work, and challenge existing narratives of care.

References

[1]
Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish. 2007. How HCI interprets the probes. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA) (CHI ’07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1077–1086.
[2]
Geoffrey C Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. The MIT Press.
[3]
V Braun and V Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual. Res. Psychol. (2006).
[4]
Dan Calacci and Alex Pentland. 2022. Bargaining with the Black-Box: Designing and Deploying Worker-Centric Tools to Audit Algorithmic Management. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2 (Nov. 2022), 1–24.
[5]
Sasha Costanza-Chock. 2020. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Information Policy). The MIT Press.
[6]
Jill P Dimond, Michaelanne Dye, Daphne Larose, and Amy S Bruckman. 2013. Hollaback! the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (San Antonio, Texas, USA) (CSCW ’13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 477–490.
[7]
Lynn Dombrowski, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, and Jessica Despard. 2017. Low-Wage Precarious Workers’ Sociotechnical Practices Working Towards Addressing Wage Theft. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4585–4598.
[8]
Sarah E Fox, Vera Khovanskaya, Clara Crivellaro, Niloufar Salehi, Lynn Dombrowski, Chinmay Kulkarni, Lilly Irani, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2020. Worker-Centered Design: Expanding HCI Methods for Supporting Labor. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8.
[9]
Evelyn Nakano Glenn. 2010. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Harvard University Press.
[10]
Erin Hatton. 2017. Mechanisms of invisibility: rethinking the concept of invisible work. Work Employ. Soc. 31, 2 (April 2017), 336–351.
[11]
Abigail Hunt and Fortunate Machingura. 2016. A good gig? The rise of on-demand domestic work. Technical Report. Overseas Development Institute.
[12]
Lilly C Irani and M Six Silberman. 2013. Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paris, France) (CHI ’13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 611–620.
[13]
R Kelly Garrett. 2006. Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs. Inf. Commun. Soc. 9, 2 (April 2006), 202–224.
[14]
Alexandra Mateescu. 2021. Electronic Visit Verification: The Weight of Surveillance and the Fracturing of Care. Technical Report. Data & Society.
[15]
Joy Ming. 2023. Wage Theft and Technology in the Home Care Context. ACM on Human-Computer InteractionCSCW (2023). In submission.
[16]
Joy Ming, Elizabeth F Kuo, Katie Go, Emily Tseng, John Kallas, Aditya Vashistha, Madeline Sterling, and Nicola Dell. 2023. “I Go Beyond and Beyond”: Examining the Invisible Work of Home Health Aides. In ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).
[17]
Darakhshan J Mir, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Brett M Frischmann, and Katherine J Strandburg. 2021. Designing for the Privacy Commons. In Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons. Cambridge University Press, 245–267.
[18]
Dawn Nafus and Rajiv Mehta. 2016. Atlas of Caregiving Pilot Study Report. Technical Report. Family Caregiver Alliance.
[19]
Dmitry Ryvkin, Danila Serra, and James Tremewan. 2017. I paid a bribe: An experiment on information sharing and extortionary corruption. Eur. Econ. Rev. 94 (May 2017), 1–22.
[20]
M Six Silberman and Lilly Irani. 2016. Operating an Employer Reputation System: Lessons from Turkopticon, 2008-2015. (Feb. 2016).
[21]
Clare L Stacey. 2011. The Caring Self. In The Caring Self. Cornell University Press.
[22]
Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss. 1999. Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Comput. Support. Coop. Work 8, 1 (March 1999), 9–30.
[23]
Madeline R Sterling, Ariel F Silva, Peggy B K Leung, Amy L Shaw, Emma K Tsui, Christine D Jones, Laura Robbins, Yanira Escamilla, Ann Lee, Faith Wiggins, Frances Sadler, Martin F Shapiro, Mary E Charlson, Lisa M Kern, and Monika M Safford. 2018. “It’s Like They Forget That the Word ‘Health’ Is in ‘Home Health Aide’”: Understanding the Perspectives of Home Care Workers Who Care for Adults With Heart Failure. Journal of the American Heart Association 7, 23 (Nov. 2018), e010134.
[24]
Elizabeth Tippett, Charlotte S Alexander, and Zev J Eigen. 2017. When timekeeping software undermines compliance. The Yale Journal of Law & Technology 19, 1 (2017).
[25]
Emily Tseng, Fabian Okeke, Madeline Sterling, and Nicola Dell. 2020. “We can learn. Why not?”: Designing Technologies to Engender Equity for Home Health Aides. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14.
[26]
Rama Adithya Varanasi, Aditya Vashistha, Rene F Kizilcec, and Nicola Dell. 2021. Investigating Technostress Among Teachers in Low-Income Indian Schools. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2 (Oct. 2021), 1–29.
[27]
Nervo Verdezoto, Naveen Bagalkot, Syeda Zainab Akbar, Swati Sharma, Nicola Mackintosh, Deirdre Harrington, and Paula Griffiths. 2021. The Invisible Work of Maintenance in Community Health: Challenges and Opportunities for Digital Health to Support Frontline Health Workers in Karnataka, South India. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1 (April 2021), 1–31.
[28]
Christine T Wolf, Mariam Asad, and Lynn S Dombrowski. 2022. Designing within Capitalism. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Virtual Event, Australia) (DIS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 439–453.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Harnessing Data Analytics For Effective Influencer Marketing and Brand EvangelismData Analytics and Influencer Marketing for Cultivating Brand Evangelism and Affinity10.4018/979-8-3693-7773-4.ch006(133-150)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024

Index Terms

  1. Data Advocacy for Visibility of Home Care Workers

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    October 2023
    596 pages
    ISBN:9798400701290
    DOI:10.1145/3584931
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 14 October 2023

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. collective action
    2. data activism
    3. frontline health
    4. worker advocacy

    Qualifiers

    • Abstract
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • Cornell Center for Social Sciences Qualitative and Interpretive Research Institute
    • National Science Foundation
    • Cornell Center for Health Equity

    Conference

    CSCW '23
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CSCW '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)124
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)25
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Harnessing Data Analytics For Effective Influencer Marketing and Brand EvangelismData Analytics and Influencer Marketing for Cultivating Brand Evangelism and Affinity10.4018/979-8-3693-7773-4.ch006(133-150)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Login options

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media