As a researcher who studies family use of technologies who was also directly observing the role technology was having in my own family, I knew immediately that technology was going to be having a crucial role in how families navigate COVID-19 and social distancing, and yet, there were also many challenges. For example, we were struggling with “account overload” as our school’s teachers all used different technologies with different logins and passwords, and watching my 4 year old try to navigate how to mute and unmute in Google Hangouts with all his classmates when most had never even used a mouse before was painful to say the least. If a family that has two PhDs in Computer Science, one of whom studies family technologies for a living, was struggling, then we knew that families with a lot less privilege would be running into many issues too, and thus I wanted to study this to find out these issues and make it better.

I had received information from the University of Washington’s Office of Research about funding available through the NSF RAPID mechanism, and I opened up a Slack thread with 3 other fantastic researchers with whom I had already collaborated with on family technology studies (Alexis Hiniker, Sean Munson, and Jason Yip, the other co-PIs on the grant) to see if they wanted to submit a grant. I also talked to a few of my PhD students who were interested in families and technologies to see if this was something they would be interested in studying. One student, Rebecca Michelson, had told me that she felt that working on a COVID-19 related research study would be a good coping strategy, as she felt she would be responsive to the pandemic. That sealed the deal for me that this was something we should pursue.

We quickly drafted a 2-page draft of an idea, which I emailed to a program officer at NSF’s Cyber-Human Systems program under the Computing (CISE) directorate, who typically funds research on human-computer interaction. He said it was a good fit for the program, but that the sooner we could put an application, the better. Thus began the fastest grant application I’d ever put together.

Normally grant applications take many weeks and months of planning and preparation, with a ton of internal deadlines before it finally gets submitted. We basically went from that 2-page draft statement to a submitted proposal about 48 hours after receiving that email, thanks to the tireless work of the research team, the excellent grant support staff in my department at UW, and UW’s Office of Research. We also rapidly put in our application for our human subjects ethics review, which was expedited due to it being about COVID-19 related research. I’m pretty sure the grant proposal was written entirely on adrenaline!

We received word from the program officer that we were likely to be funded a few weeks after our submission, but it took about another month for the funding to be finalized and be officially awarded. We knew we had to start the research in the meantime though, as we knew that we needed to capture families’ experiences while school was still in session. Thus, we took a leap of faith and began the study before the grant funding was finalized.

One of the requirements of funding through this mechanism is that our research had to be directly responsive to helping stakeholders with coping with COVID-19. For those of you who are less familiar with scientific research, while the NSF often evaluates research on their potential for broader impacts, those impacts can be further out. Thus, it was new for us to have to think about how we could design a study that would have direct and immediate benefits for families. This helped us plan out the Asynchronous Remote Communities protocol such that we can use it to build community amongst the families in our study and allow for reflection, which we had found in prior studies was a benefit to the participants. It’s also the reason we developed this blog and our social media accounts as a mechanism for sharing out findings immediately. This is a new experience for us, so we appreciate you following along with us, and let us know if you have questions you’d like to see us answer!

One great thing about NSF is that they make public every award that is granted. Soon after our award was officially granted, we were contacted by some other researchers who had also been awarded RAPID grants for similar studies on families, technology, and COVID-19, but were looking at it from different perspectives using different methods. We are planning on organizing a virtual discussion this summer to share some of our ideas and findings. If you’re also working on research in this space, we would love to connect with you, learn from you, and help cross-promote your research as well.

Thanks again to the National Science Foundation for making this research possible, and many other important scientific endeavors it funds. We’re also grateful for our program officer, Andruid Kerne, for guiding us through this process and helping us make connections to other researchers studying COVID-19.

For more information on our research as it progresses, you can follow along with our research team on Medium and Twitter.

Applying for Grant Funding for Research on Families, Technology, & COVID-19 was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“When my child is throwing a tantrum and pooping in the middle of the floor, it’s hard to remember the parenting advice I heard last week on a podcast, that you have to respond in a calm and respectful way, “ shares Katie Davis, a youth, parents, and technology researcher. So what does support for parents look like, especially in moments of high emotions and chaos? How are parents seeking support and which kinds of support are the most useful and effective? Katie Davis (Associate Professor of the Information School of the University of Washington) and Petr Slovak (Assistant Professor in HCI at the King’s College London) are studying how to inform parents’ information-seeking habits with socio-emotional learning. The dynamic duo, who both share a background in prevention science and human-computer interaction (HCI), led a research seminar on studying parents’ posts on online fora, to better understand the most common types of support-seeking behaviors and how those needs are being met.

I sat down with Katie and Petr in May 2020 to learn more about their insights from family technology research.

1. What kinds of research projects are you currently working on? What courses are you teaching related to parenting and tech?

Katie: This year, I’m teaching a course on child development in a digital age and preparing a new course on child-computer interaction. I’m also working on a project that examines how adolescents are using technology to pursue their interests, learn about their world, and engage with their peers and family members. We are currently studying how teenagers in Seattle are coping during this pandemic, using a variety of methods, including a method called “ecological momentary assessment” — which helps capture “in-the-moment” mood and behavior reflections from participating teenagers. We have recently expanded this study to teenagers in Germany as well.

Since becoming a parent in 2016, I am more aware of technology’s ability to influence parenting in both harmful or helpful ways. So I have also been studying how parents are using technology for support.

Petr: My work has focused on tech-enabled development of social-emotional skills. I started my PhD journey seeking to understand how to promote empathy between people. This evolved to looking specifically at emotional and mental health regulation. Within my PhD research, I focused on examining these issues in two complementary settings: the training of student counsellors to develop their complex interpersonal skills and supporting social-emotional skill-building through novel objects like smart toys, for young children.

We found that a smart toy intervention (see image below) did help emotional regulation for kids (see: A Smart Toy Intervention to Promote Emotion Regulation in Middle Childhood: Feasibility Study).

2. So what does it mean to build an in-the-moment support like this for parents?

We actually don’t know much about what kinds of questions parents are asking and how they are addressing their needs in the moment. So Katie and I have been running a research seminar where we are reading and analyzing parents’ posts on online fora (such as Mumsnet in the UK). This is somewhat limited because online forums are asynchronous. So if someone urgently needs support, it can be difficult to get it online.

Katie: Right. And when you got advice a week or two ago, and you’re struggling with your child in the moment, it can be hard to remember that advice.

Petr: Useful information is attuned to social-emotional skills which are more dynamic. For example, you can describe how to ride a bike or ski to someone, but it’s very different and much more responsive in the moment, as you try to find your balance. Similarly negotiation is a socio-emotional skill that takes practice. So in our parenting support research, we are not just looking at what is possible with technology, but also what new insight we can gain about the types of topics that parents need the most help with and the design mechanisms that support such situated learning.

3. What are you learning so far in your work and what have you found surprising?

Petr: We are learning that perceived benefit of support greatly influences parents. For example, parent fora (such as Mumsent, Babycenter, parent Facebook groups) can help people feel like their issues are normalized and that they are not alone in their struggles while hearing about what others have done in their shoes. These factors drive people to seek social support. We would like to compare the different ways parents receive support, analyze the online patterns, and follow-up with interviews.

It’s also been surprising that clinicians are very excited by our kinds of research, because of the kinds of access we can get with parents. Clinicians often struggle to figure out how to provide situated support because they can’t observe parents’ behaviors “in the wild” (outside of the clinic). This is a constant struggle because parents face many external, social obstacles that influence their problem-solving in the moment. Clinicians are excited by our vision for longer-term research on parents.

4. What is next for you? What do you want to see more of in the field of family technology research?

Katie: As Petr mentioned, there are lots of opportunities for HCI researchers to work more closely with practitioners, such as clinicians for developing digitally-enabled support. Currently our research has been focusing on studying parents with children ages 2–5 years old, but it would be interesting to study older children and neurodiverse children as well.

Sometimes the HCI field is overly focused on #shiny and novel projects, but there is real value in more engaged, longer-term projects that can track development and impact over time.

Petr: Yes, I appreciate the work that comes out of University of Washington, because many of the researchers do follow-on studies. It’s interesting to read about interesting and novel ideas, but it can be harder to find the data that shows longer-term impacts.

Katie: In terms of future research, we would like to see how parents’ support needs are changing during COVID-19 as well as their overall relationship to technology. Parents typically have had love-hate, hate-hate or even guilt-hate-hate relationships with technology. Nowadays technology is truly a lifeline for work, school, and social connection.

Spotlight on Designing Digital Parenting Support was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Given the recent, anti-racist protests around the country and to give everyone the space to reflect and heal, especially the Black families and families of color in the “Families and Technology during COVID-19” research study, the research team decided to pause the study activities for the first week of June 2020. Instead we made ourselves available for any additional checking-in or support if our participants needed it.

Since many parents are figuring out how to talk about race with their children, we shared some articles below but encouraged sharing any helpful resources among the parent community in the study.
• https://bit.ly/whiteparents_racism
• https://bit.ly/race_and_kids
• https://bit.ly/childrensbooks_racism

Resources shared by parents in the study:

Our study resumes next week and we will continue providing room for anti-racism work and support.

A Collective Study Pause to Make Room for Anti-Racism: Black Lives Matter was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From 322 nationwide screener responses, we enrolled 4 groups:

• Group A (the melting pot group): 13 actively participating parents who are racially diverse, have kids over a wide range of ages 3–13 years old, and family incomes that are across the spectrum.
• Group B (the single parents group): With 10 active parents, this group is majority middle class and racially diverse.
• Group C (limited resource parents): The majority of these 10 families come from family incomes in the lower half of our survey respondents. Several of the families are also limited with 1 or fewer wi-fi enabled devices in the home.
• Group D (Latinx family members): We wanted to enroll English Language Learners (ELL) families but were limited in our capacity to translate materials and conduct extensive, targeted outreach. So this group of 7 families was enrolled based on sharing that at least one member of the family identifies as Latinx.

Methods

We are applying the ARC (Asynchronous Remote Communities) method by moderating channels on Slack for each group of parents. This method is ideal for remote, distributed populations as well as marginalized communities. Affordances of ARC’s can include optional anonymity, community-building related to some aspect of a shared identity, and mutual learning as well as collaboration. Research participation looks like responding to lightweight, weekly prompts and posting pictures from activities. The thematic flow of our prompts has looked like:

Understanding participants’ needs → Refining problem statements and naming assets → Co-designing solutions

After parents made introductions and shared what advice they wish they received at the beginning of the pandemic, they completed a diary study about reflections from their tech use for schooling, working, socializing and beyond. Families went on to rank their top 3 from the most common problems we heard about. The results differed from group to group, but these were the most common issues that surfaced from the screener:

• Screen time (work/life balance, affect on kids from over-stimulation, overload of COVID information and notifications)
• Difficulties navigating multiple platforms: especially for school (too many different tools messages and poor implementation)
• Too many interruptions: difficulty finishing homework, work meetings, etc.
• Lack of in-person social connection: especially for children who are struggling
• Not enough devices per person in the household
• Privacy concerns with technology

And to (hopefully) experience some catharsis and play by writing love and break-up letters to technologies of their choice. Finally, families drew “information and resource maps” to reflect on their top sources of timely and relevant information as well as people, organizations, and support systems that they turn to in times of need:

What’s next?

Since the groups enrolled in staggering phases, Group A is the first to already begin the co-design process by brainstorming solutions for members of their families. Stay tuned to see what ideas, tips, and tricks families will create!

Introducing: Our COVID-19 Asynchronous Remote Communities Family Groups was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, we are featuring a guest voice from the field of family technology and research, Assistant Professor Radhika Garg (iSchool, Syracuse University). If you are interested in contributing your insights on families and tech during COVID-19 to the blog, please email Rebecca: rem23@uw.edu.

Technology Non-Use as a Mechanism to Build Family Resilience

Tina is a single mother of two — a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl. She lives in a suburban area of San Jose, California. She is the founder and owner of a company that sells hand-crafted jewelry, and she works as a full stack developer in one of the largest technology firms in the U.S. Her son is currently struggling to improve his reading skills, and her daughter is expected to know her fractions and times tables by the end of the academic year. However, with schools moving to online delivery mode because of COVID-19, Tina feels burdened by this change — her kids struggle to reach their academic goals solely with the help of the online teaching and resources that their teachers have provided.

In Jersey City, New Jersey, lives a family of four. John is a delivery driver, and his wife, Katie, is a school teacher. They have two boys — a six-year-old and a five-month-old. John is out for greater part of the days delivering groceries around the city as part of his job, and Katie spends her day teaching her students remotely, while taking care of her own children and completing essential household chores.

When families are hit by adversity or are undergoing some form of disruption, such as that caused by COVID-19, engaging in processes that support family resilience [5] is critical. For example, to build resilience, a family as a unit should engage in meaning making, i.e., construing and making sense of the disruption caused by COVID-19 and its impact on their relationships, and on their life goals more broadly. However, due to the fact that these are unprecedented times, families like those of Tina and John are engrossed in managing virtual learning, working remotely, performing household-tasks (many of which were earlier delegated to others, such as caregivers), and staying up-to-date with state conditions, guidelines, and policies around COVID-19. As a result, families are spending most of their daytime hours with some form of technology, except for rare occasions, such when they step out for occasional walks in the nearby woods, when they can take the time out to have a family dinner, or while playing in the yard, which in many cases do not involve both parents. Overload of technology has been known to have psychological and behavioral side-effects and adult’s technology use around children has been found to be have a significant correlation to their lack of responsiveness to children. Therefore, people can consider to intentionally and regularly observe periods of technology non-use and spend that time as a family during the week.

Past research has shown that when the design of a technology facilitates periods of non-use, it fosters togetherness in families [3, 4]. Therefore, I urge designers to consider enabling non-use through their technologies. This does not mean tracking or restricting the use of specific applications, as technology giants like Apple [1] and Google [2] are currently doing. Instead, this is a call to build in mechanisms that would lead everyone in a family to observe periods of technology non-use and that would encourage them to engage in activities of togetherness and meaning making. One way of achieving this is as follows:

• The technology could enable anyone in the family to trigger a “technology lockdown’’ for everyone in the family through an application installed on a central device, such as a laptop or a tablet. The duration of this lockdown could be mutually decided upon by the family members. Once triggered, every registered device in the household would go into a lockdown mode that allows only two functionalities: emergency calls and disabling the lock-down.
• This central application would then make recommendations on the kind of activities family members could engage in. For example, the application could assign roles to different members of the household and give them a scenario to play out without using any form of technology. The scenario could center on a specific topic that fosters resilience (e.g., how might the family try to achieve a specific goal if a second wave of pandemic hits).

Till the time when such measures are built into technology, it will be helpful if families themselves try to spend some time away from technology and engage in processes that foster family resilience, such as participating in family conversations that normalize and contextualize adversity and distress, facilitate a positive outlook, clarify ambiguous information, identify goals for the future, increase connectedness, provide space for open emotional expression and shared decision making, and prepare the family for future challenges.

Note: The two families described in this article are acquaintances of the author, and their stories are included with their permission. They are referred to by pseudonyms, and some details have been modified to protect their privacy.

References

[1] https://www.apple.com/families/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/27/17786448/youtube-time-spent-viewing-videos-new-feature

[3] Garg, R., & Sengupta, S. (2019). “ When you can do it, why can’t I?”: Racial and Socioeconomic Differences in Family Technology Use and Non-Use. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–22.

[4] Jensen, R. H., Strengers, Y., Raptis, D., Nicholls, L., Kjeldskov, J., & Skov, M. B. (2018, June). Exploring Hygge as a desirable design vision for the sustainable smart home. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 355–360).

[5] Walsh, F. (2003). Family resilience: A framework for clinical practice. Family process, 42(1),1–18.

Technology Non-Use as a Mechanism to Build Family Resilience was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The left side of my bed has a huge dent in it. My pantry has been stripped of anything with sugar, and my screen time has increased exponentially.

Feeling the same? You are not alone.

It’s safe to say that quarantine has significantly changed our lifestyles. We are used to a routine — scheduling and packing our days full of work, friends, and activities, ensuring that we are doing something productive every minute of every hour of every day. When that routine is disrupted, and you find yourselves and your famil(ies) in 24/7 isolation, what happens? For those able to work from home, how do you maintain productivity? How do you fill the role of a teacher with your kids? How do you cope with spending more time with family or roommates than you ever have before? For those living alone, how do you handle what can be overwhelming loneliness?

If there’s one thing we’ve seen through this, it’s that as human beings, we adapt. As weeks and months have passed, attitudes towards isolation have changed, and despite the many challenges, we have managed to push through. We continue to find new ways of fulfilling ourselves while continuing to work, learn, take care of those around us, and stay as healthy as we can.

While there are ways in which we are succeeding, it is still important to note that individuals can be struggling beneath the surface — whether it is anxiety about the future, what seems like a never ending news cycle, or feelings of loneliness that can accompany isolation. To help with these feelings and ensure you are protecting your mental health during this pandemic, there are numerous resources available out there. I have linked some of them below, along with my personal experiences and favorites.

1. Exercise. Cardio has been proven to directly stimulate both dopamine and serotonin in your brain, which contribute to memory, focus/productivity, and mood, among other things. By making exercise a priority, you will be making a huge impact on your lifestyle. Be consistent. Set realistic goals. Even if you manage to set aside 20–30 minutes to get your body moving, pat yourself on the back! There are so many at home tutorials out available for free on platforms like Youtube and Instagram that you can take advantage of.
2. Meditation. Before I realized how simple it can be, I used to look at meditation as a chore. Over time, I’ve realized that without it, we tend to spend most of our time dwelling on the past or focusing on and worrying about the future. Now, every night, I make sure to get in at least 30 minutes of mindfulness, which snaps me back into the present. I keep a cool temperature in my space, put my phone away, close my eyes and sit back. To help ease you into meditation, check out apps like Calm, Headspace, and Spotify podcasts.
3. Limit News Exposure. With less human stimulation in our day to day, we spend more time on our phones and watching TV, where it is hard to avoid seeing notifications and news about the ongoing crisis. While it is important to stay aware and informed, limiting exposure to what can often be negative stimuli can make a huge positive difference to your life. Try and stop yourself from constantly refreshing these sources of information, and set a time limit each day for watching/reading the news. Decrease the number of news sources you check. Mute accounts and individuals that may trigger stress.
4. Find a Hobby! We are probably finding ourselves with more time than we have ever had before. It’s important to use this time to invest in yourself — Find a new passion, pick up an interesting book, try painting, do a puzzle, or even learn a new language! Over the past month and a half, I have channeled my restlessness into baking (and eating), which has allowed me to take a break from my screen while learning something new that I enjoy. Try your best to do something away from the screen, and allow your mind to rest.

Many of you have unique situations at home where it might be harder to try these things. It’s also normal to not feel motivated or not find time to prioritize yourself. A trick that I have learned over the past four months is to set SMART goals for myself each day- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Based. If your goal is to spend thirty minutes on cardio on Tuesday, make sure to set mini goals or steps that can help you reach that big goal. For example, set an alarm for earlier that morning so you can finish other responsibilities earlier in the day. Look up a thirty-minute workout and have it saved and ready to go! Wear gym clothes throughout the day so that you do not have to put in any extra effort to work out when you find yourself with some precious free time.

Learn more tips related to the setting prioritizing exercise and meditation, limiting negative stimuli, finding a hobby, and setting SMART goals below:

• 10 Ways to Boost Dopamine and Serotonin Naturally
• What is Mindfulness?
• Getting Started- Mindfulness
• When the daily news causes stress, limit your intake
• 15 New Hobbies to Try During Quarantine 2020 | The Strategist
• SMART goals

Remember to prioritize your mental health. These are uncertain times, and we need all the support we can get. 😊

My name is Ria Nagar, and I graduated from the University of Washington in 2019 with a degree in Psychology and Informatics. I currently work there as a Research Assistant, where over the past two and a half years, I have worked on three different research initiatives focused on adolescents and depression. My latest project explores patterns of technology use within families during the current COVID-19 crisis. I plan on continuing to explore research opportunities at the intersection of psychology and technology at the University of Glasgow as a masters student in 2020. In the future, I plan on receiving my PhD in Clinical Psychology.

Prioritizing Mental Health During COVID-19 was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After several weeks of recruitment and over 290 responses, the first 15 families enrolled in the “Families and Technology during COVID-19” study! Families are responding to prompts and will be participating in design activities through Slack. The three main goals of this study are to:

1. Learn about how families are adapting to and leveraging technology at this time and which resources and strategies are most effective
2. Co-design solutions that can build family resilience
3. Share practical learnings with the public

The first group of 15 diverse participants includes families from around the country: Alabama, Washington D.C. Massachusetts, Washington and more with a broad range of kids ages, from 1–18. Some parents have been laid off from work while others have a parent in the household who is an essential worker and shoulders increased work hours. We’re learning from parents in real time, as they balance work needs, caregiving, and facilitating remote schooling. As parents are introducing themselves this week, they are also reflecting on: what advice they would give themselves — in the first days of learning to stay at home — that they know now but didn’t know then. Many of the families and those who responded to the screener shared struggles with managing too many different schooling platforms, messages, and needing to learn new tools for classwork. The biggest anxiety shared by families has been way too much screen-time.

Parents in the study are sharing some compassionate advice, such as: following cues from your kids, as to not push them to work, if they are having trouble. One parent shared: “In hindsight, I wish I realized that home learning would not look like school learning and that is okay! Trying to do school at home is not realistic for us. I would remind myself to take a breath, get kids on schedule and not stress/freak out if something doesn’t happen on one day. It will all be okay. What most important is making sure it’s sustainable and a positive experience for all”.

While this study is focused on technology, we are also taking note of the social-emotional factors at play. One parent’s advice to her pre-pandemic self would have been to set clear boundaries. She writes,

“Especially because I have a family of 6 in a very small house. I was sitting at the dining room table today, working on three different monitors, breastfeeding my 7 month old, leading a discussion on a conference call… and my 13 year old starts waving his arms furiously to get my attention. I excuse myself and mute my call and ask what’s the emergency?!! He needed a drink and wanted to know if we had juice in the cabinet. The cabinet that he is standing next to. He’s 13. 🤔 🙄 Meanwhile my partner was in the next room playing cars with our toddler. So yeah, boundaries. 😄😂”

Our first group of parents will be moving onto a diary study next week, so that we can learn more specifics about their experiences with technologies (to prepare for co-designing solutions). In the meantime, we are also enrolling a group of single parents, since they may face different daily challenges. We are currently still recruiting for this study, though focusing on essential workers (such as healthcare workers, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, bus drivers, etc.) and ESL (English as a Second Language) families. If you know anyone who would be interested, please feel free to share this screener. Stay tuned for more stories, tips, and resources — through Medium and Twitter!

Co-written with Ria Nagar

Project Kick-off: Families and Tech in COVID was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Understanding Families’ Technology Supports During COVID-19

Are you a parent with a child or children between the ages of 3–13 years old? Join an interactive, paid nationwide study on family technology use during COVID-19. For up to 20 minutes a week, share your challenges, strategies and resources for balancing work-related changes, school, care-taking, and more. Collaborate with other families on designing solutions that help families build resilience in the future.

Please fill out this 10 minute survey (https://bit.ly/family_screener) and the research team will follow up with you next steps. You can read more about the research project here: “How families can use technology to juggle childcare and remote life”, UW News press release, Sarah McQuate, April 14th, 2020. Questions? Email Rebecca: rem23@uw.edu.

Recruiting Families for COVID-19 Design Research! was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The COVID-19 situation is unlike any that we have faced in the last century. Families today have been undergoing a significant amount of stress as many transition to a world of social distancing, attempt to maintain children’s schooling at home, lose access to childcare, and manage working from home or working in essential jobs supporting the health and safety of their neighborhoods. Interactive technology is and will continue to play an important role in this transition, and it is our hope to understand how the way that technology is designed is either supporting or hindering families. Our work will inform the design of these technologies to make them better work for families in times of disruption.

We are a group of researchers at the University of Washington with expertise in human-centered design, information science, learning sciences, and interaction design & children. We have spent many years studying the design of interactive technology and how it impacts the lives of families and youth. Several of us are also parents ourselves and are personally experiencing both the highs and lows of this time. We want to systematically understand the experiences of families to collect stories, generate knowledge, and inform the design of interactive technologies for families. We are grateful to have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s RAPID program to embark on this research.

With this research, we aim to understand technology’s role in how families with children between the ages of 3 and 13 navigate this situation. How are current designs supporting or hindering families during this time? How are they helping families connect? Are diverse families being impacted in different ways? How can technology be better designed?

We will be recruiting 30 diverse families with children between the ages of 3 and 13 to participate remotely in an online platform over an 8–10 week period. We will be collecting stories and experiences, asking families to review and rate technology, and inviting families to help us co-design better technologies that would support their needs and situations. We expect that families will contribute approximately 20–30 minutes per week toward the project. If you’re interested in participating in our study, please complete our screener survey and we will contact you if you are eligible to participate. We expect that families participating in our study will be able to share and reflect on their experiences and meet and learn from others who are in a similar situation.

We also invite parents, caregivers, children, extended family, technology designers, and researchers to follow along as our study unfolds and we share stories and experiences. Our longer-term goal will be to produce scientific manuscripts, but our immediate goal is to share our findings as we learn them to help as many families as possible learn from and immediately apply our findings to their own situations.

Feel free to follow our research along or various social media channels:

• Medium
• Twitter

We will soon be also adding accounts to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Technology’s Role in Families Navigating the COVID-19 Context was originally published in Families and Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.