Nov 15, 2013 - Social media is increasingly being used to support interaction among family ... Older adults, social media, communication asymmetry, familiar.
Aligning intergenerational communication patterns and rhythms in the age of social media 1
Diego Muñoz1, Raymundo Cornejo2, Sergio F. Ochoa1, Jesús Favela2, Francisco Gutierrez1 and Mónica Tentori2
Computer Science Department, Universidad de Chile. Av. Blanco Encalada 2120. Santiago, Chile {dimunoz,sochoa,frgutier}@dcc.uchile.cl 2 Department of Computer Science, CICESE. Carretera Ensenada-Tijuana 3918. 22860 Ensenada, Mexico {rcornejo,favela,mtentori}@cicese.mx
ABSTRACT Social media is increasingly being used to support interaction among family members. However, differences in media preferences and interaction patterns challenge intergenerational communication. It impacts negatively on the physical and mental health of older adults. Trying to bridge such a communication asymmetry, this paper reports the primary results of an analysis conducted on an existent dataset from two 21-weeks deployment studies, along with a 3-week design study, to understand intergenerational communication mismatches among older adults and relatives. Results indicate opportunities that informed the design and implementation of the Social Connector system, a software application that allows older adults to establish synchronous and asynchronous social interactions with their relatives. The paper also describes this system and discusses the main design decisions made to try reducing the stated communication asymmetry.
This situation is particularly relevant for elders, since social networks tend to decrease as we age, and it has been proved that this reduction impacts negatively on the physical and cognitive health of older adults [15]. Trying to address this challenge, this paper presents the results of a preliminary study that helps understand intergenerational social interaction within families. These results motivated the redesign of the Social Connector system [11], aimed at strengthening the social connection of elders with their families. Next section presents the related work. Section 3 describes the study performed to understand communication between elders and their families. Section 4 introduces the Social Connector system and its main components. Section 5 shows how the main findings of the study are addressed by the implemented system. Section 6 presents the conclusions and future work.
2. RELATED WORK Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.m [Miscellaneous]: INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION
General Terms Design, Human Factors.
Keywords Older adults, social media, communication asymmetry, familiar communities.
1. INTRODUCTION Advances in information technology have promoted the appearance of new communication media (e.g. email, social networking services and videoconference). Young adults and teens usually are early adopters of these media, while elders have traditionally been reluctant at using new technologies. As new media may become popular every few years, different generations within a family might have divergent media preferences (e.g. adolescents preferring Facebook, adults email, and older adults telephone and/or letters). These differences in media preferences generate a communication asymmetry between family members, since media used by young people are not used by older adults. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ChileCHI’13, November 11–15, 2013, Temuco, Chile. Copyright 2013 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00.
Tee et al. [14] conducted a study involving parents and grandparents in order to examine how people use existing technologies to communicate with their extended family. The authors found the following challenges faced by the communication parties: (1) coordinate a time slot for allowing communication, (2) overcome the perceived effort for initiating a communication, especially when using interaction mechanisms other than talking (e.g. sharing photos), (3) overcome the apprehension and perceived obsolescence toward technology, and (4) overcome social challenges perceived as an obligation and consideration for extended family members. Moreover, the study found that there is a communication pattern that reflects a strong interest in children, and particularly grandchildren. Cornejo et al. [4] studied the role of ambient awareness within intergenerational families in order to observe the quality of communication and relationships, especially in older adults. The authors found that, on one hand, younger relatives partially circumvent the communication barriers (e.g. technological abilities, geographical distance), and build empathy and social connectedness by sharing photographs, activities or comments with emotional content through social networking services. On the other hand, some older adults have relatives acting as proxies to show them the information shared in these social systems, while others rely on face-to-face interaction and telephone communication to keep in touch with relatives or learn about their activities. In the context of understanding the existing communication uses and needs among older adults, Riche and Mackay [13] conducted a study aiming to identify the key aspects of these adults that affect their independence and well-being. The authors found that
some forms of communication do not involve explicit sharing of messages, but rather an on-going awareness of the other person's state. That is, people tend to use both personal and environmental cues to help them interpret what is happening to the other person. Moreover, communication routines and rhythms have an important role when interacting with others. Regarding video-mediated communication, users tend to use this media for bringing a sense of closeness with the people they communicate with [9]. Moreover, it is important when designing video-supporting systems to consider mechanisms that allow people to easily deduce other's availability and willingness to video conference, as well as providing access to people for easily sharing everyday activities [7]. When considering communication with members in distant places, this interaction is typically affected by the misalignment of daily schedules between the two parties, due to the different time zones. In this scenario, Cao et al. [2] found that asynchronous communication is recognized as more flexible, but in the practice synchronous communication is preferred for facilitating an emotional connection among family members. Ames et al. [1] studied the practices around videochat in a familiar scenario, including remote relatives. Video is perceived as a means to create, enact and reinforce family values even at a distance. Families put considerable work into balancing the various needs of their members, from children to grandparents, in deciding when and how to keep in contact. Regarding the perceived benefits of videochat, it is considered as an alternative synchronous means of communication that has more available supports than traditional interaction channels, such as telephone calls. Nevertheless, even if the former apparently seems to require more work to complete, the greatest benefit of video communication is its capacity for providing remote family members (e.g. grandchildren and grandparents) with an apparent sense of presence, and allowing getting to know one another better than they could with only voice support. According to Judge et al. [8], despite the fact that video conferencing allows remote family members to socially interact in a synchronous way, most of these systems are designed for phonelike calls between only two locations. Therefore, the authors designed a media space to support shared video between different locations. However, even if this approach to solve the problem of social connection seems promising (i.e. it increases presence awareness), it may raise privacy issues, usability and accessibility concerns when dealing with older adults. Finally, when envisioning the design of software support for social interaction and social presence, there are additional issues to be considered [10]: (1) overcome the limitations of technology to provide presence awareness, (2) maintain face-to-face contact especially for supporting the interaction with older adults, (3) consider heterogeneous preferences of social media, (4) provide the possibility of mutual social interaction, and (5) properly address usability and accessibility concerns. Although these studies have helped us understand the role of social media as a support for people interactions, they have not particularly addressed the communication asymmetry described in this article. Our proposal tries to deal with this challenge, although it considers only the asymmetry between older adults and their relatives. This represents a first step towards addressing communication asymmetry in a broader sense.
3. DESIGN STUDY Data collected from two 21-week deployment studies [5] was analyzed to expand the understanding on older adults and relatives’ availability management, media preference and communication commitment. Complementing the analyzed dataset, nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with adults and older adults to further understand communication routines, coordination, and media preferences. Participants were encouraged to describe stories, and discuss what they found interesting, surprising, or different while communicating with their relatives and friends. Interviews were conducted face-to-face or through Skype; in that case, the older adults required a proxy to establish the video call in order to be interviewed. Interviews lasted between 20 and 90 minutes (M = 38) and were audio recorded. Recordings were listened and relevant or valuable segments to the interview questions were transcribed. Following data analysis methods from [12], data gathered was analyzed following axial coding techniques to derive affinity diagrams [6] with the aim of uncovering emergent themes in relation to availability management, media preference and communication commitment, and possible connections among participants in terms of the themes described above. Meetings were held with the research team to discuss and corroborate emergent themes.
3.1 Dataset and interview participants Twelve transcripts were selected from the prior dataset based on the relatives scattered locations –Mexico and United States– and means of communication: one older adult (female), three children (all female), six grandchildren (three female), one grandniece and one nephew1. Also, nine participants were recruited from Mexico (2), Colombia (3), Chile (2) and Argentina (2) to take part in the interviews. Four of these participants were elders (age: 66 - 76, M = 72, S.D. = 4.55), and five adults (age: 24 - 47, M = 33.4, S.D. = 9.71). The occupation of older adults was housewives, university teacher, and retired; occupations of adults included IT consultant, computer engineer, and university professor. All older adults participating in the design study lived with their spouse and had at least one child living away. All but one of the participants used computers at least once as a communication media (e.g. chat, email or Skype); however, their main media was telephone or mobile phone for shorter calls, and one older adult still used postal mail. The parents of the interviewed adults were also living in a different city. In contrast with the older adults, their relatives regularly used a broad range of communication media (e.g. social networking services, email, and mobile phone) with family and friends.
3.2 Design findings Findings from the design study suggested design insights that should be integrated into an interactive communication system to ease communication between older adults and their relatives by balancing media use and matching both older adults’ and relatives’ communication routines and patterns.
3.2.1 Balancing media use The increased diversity of media use across generations creates 1
Further participants’ details can be found in [3].
communication asymmetries making it difficult for users to communicate with each other. Although elders’ relatives adopt rather easily new media, they usually prefer one or two, thus creating a gap, not only with elders, but also among themselves. A12: “I do not have problems using any system but I prefer email to stay in touch”3 This media preference is emphasized in older adults, who are less inclined to use new communication technologies. Therefore, their relatives heavily depend on face-to-face interactions or traditional communication media, such as the telephone, to stay in touch. A5: “I only use the telephone [to stay in touch with my grandparents]. And I try to avoid using email with my family” In some scenarios, the diverse preference of media made some relatives use a different than their preferred one to stay in touch with the elder. While some older adults started communication by using paper-based media (e.g. postal mail), their relatives avoided this media and replied by using more traditional media (e.g. telephone). As older adult 1 stated: OA14: “I send them congratulation cards or photos by [postal] mail, and then they call me to thank me” Therefore, media preferences create inherent communication asymmetries. Incorporating a contact repository component into a communication system that bridges the diverse media used across generations might alleviate the problems of asymmetries. This component should collect contact information of each relative and their preferred media.
3.2.2 Easing communication practices Younger adults showed no need of having pre-arranged meetings with their peers unless it was with older adults. The flexibility of using several media allowed them to stay in touch regardless others’ routines and communication patterns. As stated by A5, younger generations, in some occasions, use different media depending on the importance or the length of the shared information, even if they tend to have a preferred media. A5: “It depends on what I am doing or want to say. If it is something short I would use IM, but for something more complex I would use my [mobile] phone”. It seems each communication media is more adequate depending on the context of the shared information. Each media has its own interaction and usage rules; therefore, a myriad of these media creates a major complexity for older adults who have to learn these rules to blend in and interact with others. For example, each media has its own form to indicate other users’ availability (e.g. text-based or icon-based), and elders have to learn its form for each media. This increases difficulty as stated by OA3, where communication systems include availability indicators that seem to be somehow confusing for older adults.
provide availability awareness and simplify the inherent benefits of each media to ease the use for older adults.
3.2.3 Availability awareness based on routines and patterns Informants reported being generally conscious of the daily routines and communication patterns of their relatives and friends whom they wanted to stay in touch with (e.g. elders consider the job schedules of their relatives during weekdays). OA5: “I know their schedules, and I try to estimate their availability”. Similarly, relatives showed some awareness of their peers’ schedules; however, adults had the sense that older adults were more available than their other peers, due to older adults being retired. As OA5 stated, in occasions this perception by younger adults tends to generate some concern in older adults of not being available when needed. OA5: “… the only schedule I am worried [of not being available] is when I am taking a nap and this is the time they would be available”. The uncertainty of explicitly knowing if others are available comes from prior knowledge acquired from explicit tasks, which can vary in long term or are due to unexpected events where participants modify their routines. Therefore, older adults had strategies, such as planning communication times in advance, to ensure availability from both parties. Communication systems should suit the patterns and routines of their users and explicitly inform participants’ availability. The importance of being available seems to be closely related to the routines and patterns of participants, and the capabilities of using diverse communication media. Matching the routines and patterns of close relatives and friends might alleviate the elders’ tensions to manage communication times and promote social interaction.
4. THE SOCIAL CONNECTOR The Social Connector is a software system that was conceived to facilitate the social integration of an older adult with the rest of his/her family using social media [11]. Considering the results of the previous study, we redesigned the system to improve its capability for supporting social interaction of older adults by addressing the communication asymmetry between them and their relatives. The system allows older adults to interact with their relatives using a simple user interface on a slate (Fig. 1). Elders perceive this solution as a system similar to a telephone, which includes various communication possibilities.
OA3: “I do not understand all of it, sometimes I think pressing a button will have unexpected results, so I avoid [doing] that”. A communication system that bridges this myriad of communication media should include well-defined means to
2
A= adult participant.
3
Participants’ quotes were translated from Spanish to English, and some were adjusted to fit English grammar conventions.
4
OA = older adult participant.
Figure 1. Older adult using the Social Connector
Figure 2. Basic Architecture of the Social Connector In order to preserve the telephone metaphor and ensure the system availability when required, the slate is fixed to a wall and the Social Connector is active all the time. Next sections describe the system architecture, the rationale behind the main design decisions and the implemented prototype.
it does not allow a direct interaction between the person that publishes a picture and those that watch it. These photos usually act as a mechanism to trigger interactions among older adults and the family members (e.g. liking a photo).
4.1 Architecture The system adheres to a client-server architecture that considers two client components and a data repository (Fig. 2). The main client component is the communication module that is used by the older adults to interact with the rest of the family using the slate. The other client component is the community administration module that allows some family members to configure the familiar community that is visible for an older adult. The communities repository (that runs in the server) is in charge of providing data persistency to all communities. The older adults’ relatives and friends can use their regular communication services (e.g. email, Skype, Facebook) to keep in touch with family members, thus creating a sense of interacting through the same application regardless of personal social media preferences. However, when the communication involves an older adult, the Social Connector addresses the asymmetry by acting as an intergenerational communication bridge between older adults and the rest of the family. In fact, the rest of the family might not be aware of the fact that the older adults are interacting through the Social Connector, rather than using email, Skype and/or Facebook applications.
4.2 The Communication Module This module implements four communication channels (Fig. 3): (1) videoconferences, (2) private messages, (3) public messages, and (4) a photo display. By default, the videoconferences are Skype video calls; therefore elders must have a Skype account. Similarly, the private messages are emails (provided through a Gmail account), and the public messages are messages in the Facebook wall. The photo display is an output channel; therefore
Figure 3. Social Connector main user interface Each communication channel has its own user interface. In order to initiate a video call, the user accesses his/her contact list and indicates the person to be contacted. Figure 4.a shows the contact list of an older adult, where we can see who are available (e.g. Sergio and Carla) and unavailable to contact (e.g. David). This awareness mechanism allows addressing, at least partially, the requirement raised by the participants in the presented study, which indicates that people want to know when the person to be contacted is available for interaction. Figure 4.b shows the interface to visualize private messages (i.e. emails). The older adults can respond these messages using voice communication. A speech to text translator helps create the email that will be then sent to the target contact. Figure 4.c. shows the public messages interface and Figure 4.d presents the photo display (shared pictures). This last service, which was implemented by integrating the Tlatoque system [5], allows the
slate to act also as a digital frame during the periods when there is no activity on the device.
Therefore the Social Connector does not need to access the server to start an interaction process. Periodically, the communication module tries to access the communities repository to check if the buddy list information kept locally is updated. If this is not the case, then the buddy list updater (see Fig. 2) updates the local copy of such a list. The buddy list also stores detailed information about each contact, which allows the system to support the interactions properly. The contact record has the following information: [contact ID, contact name, photo, gender, age range, familiar relationship, email address, Skype username, Facebook username, preferred communication media]
Figure 4. User interfaces of the Social Connector services
4.3 The Community Administration Module Every older adult has a buddy list that includes the owner’s record (his/her personal information, and the information to access the diverse communication channels) and a list of contacts. These contacts can play one of two roles: manager of the buddy list or regular contact. The first ones are in charge of creating and managing one or more buddy lists using the community administration module. This module is a Web application that can be used to create a buddy list for an older adult and manage it accordingly, by adding/removing contacts, changing roles to the buddy list members, and also changing the attributes of the buddy list owner and his/her contacts (e.g. photo, contact name and email account). The following structure summarizes a buddy list of an older adult. [owner ID, name, photo, range age, email address, Skype username, Facebook username, preferred communication media], {[contact ID, role]}
The buddy lists can be overlapped, and a contact can play different roles in different buddy lists. For instance, the common contact in Fig. 5 can be the owner of the buddy list B (typically an older adult) and a regular member of the buddy list A. This type of buddy list configuration allows older adults to include not only family members, but also neighbors or friends with whom they might want to communicate. Buddy List A
Buddy List B
Owner Manager Contact
Figure 5. Example of two overlapped buddy lists A contact can be reused if he/she already belongs to another buddy list. The communities repository exposes the Web services that allow this and other components to perform these operations.
4.4 The Communities Repository This component runs in the system server and provides persistency to the buddy list and the activity log file of each community. The buddy list is represented as an XML file that is stored on both the system server and the older adult’s device.
Some personal information like gender, age range and familiar relationship (between the local user and the contact) are not particularly relevant for the system services, but they are useful for analyzing interactions based on the log file data. The preferred communication media of each contact helps the system select the most appropriate channel to interact with each user. On the other hand, the activity log file of an older adult is kept in the server as a way to have such information available when required, and also to provide a logical order (in terms of the sequence of events) to the interactions records. The current log file structure is the following: [owner ID, {[activity ID, source destination contact ID, timestamp]}
contact
ID,
5. DISCUSSION This section presents a discussion on the design decisions made to address the communication asymmetry created by differences in media preferences and interaction patterns, while providing a simple interface for older adults. Next we present and discuss the most relevant decisions. Use of social media. Concerning the need to align the social media used to support interactions between older adults and their families, the system provides three alternative channels, one synchronous and two asynchronous. The behavior of the asynchronous channels can be dynamically adapted depending on the preferences of the target user, and thus it is possible to address part of the stated social media asymmetry. Communication patterns and rhythms. The system provides synchronous and asynchronous communication channels that contribute to match the different communication patterns and rhythms of family members. Similar to the previous case, it also contributes to address the stated asymmetry. Presence awareness. For synchronous communication the system indicates (in the contact list) when a contact is available to interact with others. This helps address the need of counting on presence awareness to decide when triggering a social interaction. System availability. Since the buddy list is stored in both the server and the elders’ device, the system does not need to have a connection with the server to allow the social interactions. This impacts positively on the system availability. User interface. Provided that older adults are usually reluctant to use of social media applications, the user interface of the system is simple, and it can be used through natural interfaces (the hands and the voice).
Perceived value. The photo display acts as a digital frame during the periods when there is no activity in the system. This contributes to perceive a value for the system even when it is idle. User self-confidence. When the system detects more than 2 minutes of inactivity in the device, it automatically deploys the main user interface. This mechanism helps increase selfconfidence of older adults to access the communication channels from a well-known starting point. Self-governance. The system is automatically launched when the older adult turns on the slate, making it unnecessary for him/her to input usernames and passwords. During the periods when the user is sleeping the system turns off the user interface and the device volume to avoid disturbing the older adult. After that period the system recovers its regular configuration. Information provision. The system periodically checks the Gmail and Facebook accounts of the older adult and retrieves the new messages and photos that could be relevant for that user. Relevance is determined by the identity of the user who sends the message or publishes the photo. If that person is in the elder’s buddy list, then the resource becomes visible for the local user. Otherwise, it is discarded.
6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK This article presented a study that evidences a communication asymmetry between older adults and their relatives. This asymmetry is produced mainly due to the lack of balance in the social media preferred to support these interactions, and also due to a mismatch between interaction rhythms and communication patterns within members of a family. Reducing this asymmetry is particularly relevant for older adults, because they tend to become socially isolated, which affects their physical and mental health. Trying to contribute to address this challenge, we used the results from a user study to redesign the Social Connector system, a software application that aims at connecting older adults with their relatives. The new version of the system integrates the use of several social media services. It also supports users’ preferences about the communication channels to be used to contact them. Moreover, the Social Connector provides presence awareness (user availability) as a support to synchronous interactions. These new capabilities of the system allowed us to address, in various interaction scenarios, the requirements identified in the presented study. However, a formal evaluation is required to identify the real strengths and weaknesses of the system. Such an activity is part of the next steps. In addition, we plan to integrate availability and presence awareness through ambient monitoring. For instance, the eBowl [3] uses the RFID tag in the keychain of the older adult to infer that the user is at home and notify the social network accordingly. Similarly, the system could detect if the person is watching TV, taking a bath, or cooking, and based on that indicate availability to relatives.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been partially supported by the LACCIR project, grant: R1210LAC002, and the Fondecyt Project (Chile), grant: 1120207. The work of Francisco Gutierrez has been supported by the Conicyt (Chile) Ph.D. scholarship.
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