Material and Ethical Considerations for Community Based Research in Rural Appalachia
Rural Appalachia contains multitudes. It has a rich local culture, which is often denied by outsiders (Denham, 2016). Residents experience disadvantages, compared with the rest of the United States, on the basis of digital access, education, poverty (Pollard & Jacobsen, 2022), and mortality rates (ARC, n.d.), among other factors, but many residents benefit from systemic privileges as well. In our work developing and deploying digital-storytelling-for-digital-literacy education in a small, rural Appalachian community, we gained a personal understanding of the complexity of this region and the dilemmas, both ethical and material, this complexity can present. We explored and grappled with these dilemmas in two recent papers presented at CSCW 2022, where we describe our experiences conducting values-inclusive research in this region.
Our key contributions are:
- A series of provocations about the ethical dilemmas of conducting values-inclusive research with participants who hold values that contradict those of the researchers’.
- An approach called Designing for Shared Values which centers values-inclusive design around values held by both participants and researchers.
- Recognition of digital storytelling as a culturally resonant form of digital literacy education in Appalachia.
- Consideration of the transformed experience of modern technology usage under poor infrastructural conditions, which introduces barriers to effective learning and reinforces negative self-efficacy.
Ethical considerations of community-based design research
This section summarizes the following paper presented at CSCW 2022:
Rebecca M. Jonas and Benjamin V. Hanrahan. 2022. Designing for Shared Values: Exploring Ethical Dilemmas of Conducting Values Inclusive Design Research. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 291 (November 2022), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555182
When we first started working with a rural Appalachian community in pre-pandemic 2020, it quickly became clear to us that the current political climate surfaced some new ethical complications to community-based research than we had experienced before. Participants probed us for our values and viewpoints on moral and political issues. We wanted to be honest without creating conflict that could damage our relationship with them and preclude us from carrying out this research and providing the benefit that we believed it would afford. These early conversations with research participants, as well as social movements like Black Lives Matter that gained widespread attention in 2020, led us to consider a series of provocations for ethical design research.
These provocations cover a range of ethical considerations, from power in researcher/participant relationships, to impacts of design research on indirect stakeholders, to the necessary extent of engagement with social justice. For example, we ask, To whom are we as designers responsible? to consider how we should balance our responsibility to our participants and our perceived responsibility to indirect stakeholders who may be impacted by outcomes of our work, particularly when responsibilities to those different groups may be in conflict. This question led us to ask, Should researchers conduct participatory research with participants with whom they have conflicting values? which led us to another question, and through this series of provocations, we present our thought process in exploring different ethical facets of this work. Our goal with exploring these provocations publicly is to open up a broader discussion around these complicated ethical considerations, and to expose the muddiness of ethical gray areas in this type of work.
For our research engagement with this community, considering these provocations led us to an approach we call Designing for Shared Values. This approach proposes that once participants’ and researchers’ values are surfaced through values elicitation, only those values which all stakeholders agree upon are included in the design process.
This approach is intended to ensure that researchers consider research impacts on indirect stakeholders and proactively prevent harm to those stakeholders in the design process, while upholding participant values.
Material conditions of rural computing environments
This section summarizes the following paper presented at CSCW 2022:
Rebecca M. Jonas and Benjamin V. Hanrahan. 2022. Digital Storytelling for Developing Computer Skills in Rural Appalachia. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 508 (November 2022), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555621
With the conceptual approach described in the previous section in place and pandemic conditions permitting the resumption of fieldwork, we deployed digital literacy education in our research community. The educational tools we developed centered around digital storytelling, as we found storytelling to be a highly culturally resonant practice in Appalachia, and our specific research community.
The storytelling aspect of these tools was a hit. Participants were passionate about storytelling, sharing heartfelt stories of relatives who had passed away, children’s stories they had created, and comedic essays, all rich with local culture and history. One participant sang original songs which told tales of Appalachia now, and during historical events like the American Civil War. Participants’ confidence in storytelling, as a generations-old cultural practice, helped to offset their discomfort with computer use. Our participants engaged with storytelling in deep and meaningful ways, learning computer skills, like adjusting volume controls and using spell check, as they recorded stories about local history and family legacies. However, our earlier testing of network conditions did not prepare us for the network unreliability we experienced when deploying the systems.
The network conditions at our study site, a small public library, were dismal during the times we had scheduled to work with participants, often dropping to such low speeds (<1 Mbps) that we were unable to capture them on internet speed tests. We observed participants’ frustration with using basic computer functionalities, like opening a program or typing in a form, under these slow conditions, and realized the extent of the impact that speed makes on experience of use.
Our participants were not simply experiencing a degraded version of use in high-speed environments, their experience was entirely different, resulting in barriers to learning skills and developing self-efficacy. For example, a participant noticed she had made a typing error in the form web page, and started to hit the backspace key to correct it. The form did not reflect her use of the backspace key, so she assumed she had hit it incorrectly, perhaps not hard enough or not for a long enough time, and pressed it again, harder and longer, to attempt to correct her mistake. Instead, the webpage had not yet processed the initial keypress, and when the network “caught up,” all keypresses registered, deleting far more than she had intended. These types of occurrences lead to rural residents not knowing what they have done wrong and blaming themselves for undesirable outcomes.
We have seen rural Appalachian residents’ creativity and passion, from the stories they contributed to our research, and their resourcefulness in working around challenging infrastructural conditions to learn and use new computer skills. Therefore, we agree with assertions from prior work (e.g., Hardy et al., 2019) that we, as a research community, should move away from the “rural deficit” model that subtly, or overtly, blames rural residents for their lack of access to and engagement with digital technologies that were not designed in or for rural areas. We also believe that the material challenges that rural residents face with computing infrastructure must be highlighted and addressed for there to be effective learning environments in these regions.
References
Appalachian Regional Commission [ARC](n.d.). Appalachian Region Health Disparities and Bright Spots. [Fact Sheet]. https://www.arc.gov/report/appalachian-region-health-disparities-and-bright-spots/
Denham, S. A. (2016). Does a Culture of Appalachia Truly Exist? Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 27(2), 94–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659615579712
Hardy, J., Phelan, C., Vigil-Hayes, M., Su, N. M., Wyche, S., & Sengers, P. (2019). Designing from the rural. Interactions, 26(4), 37–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328487
Pollard, K., Jacobsen, L. A. (2022). The Appalachian Region: A Data Overview from the 2016–2020 American Community Survey Chartbook. Appalachian Regional Commission & Population Reference Bureau. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/PRB_ARC_Chartbook_ACS_2016-2020_FINAL_2022-09.pdf
