"Wearing a High Heel and a House Shoe at the Same Time": Parents' Information Needs While Navigating Change in their Child's Behavioral Care

Change is an inevitable part of a parent's role, whether due to their child's development, family life, or external events. To understand the information needs of parents navigating change, we studied the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as a widely experienced disruption in the lives of parents and children. We interviewed 16 parents about their caregiving experience as the COVID-19 pandemic collapsed boundaries between home, school, and work. In particular, we asked about adjustments to behavioral care, or the social learning, supports, and interventions through which children develop social and emotional skills. We focused on parents of children already receiving accommodations and behavioral support from their school, to understand how disruptions in these services affected the role of the parent in meeting their child's individual needs. Applying role theory and the Kübler-Ross change curve, we describe the coping mechanisms that parents used to navigate the stages of change, as well as the information needs that remained unmet, despite their efforts. We discuss how practitioner-initiated and parent-centered supports can be designed around the lived experience of change, by accommodating a parent's capacity to accept and use help at different stages. © 2022 ACM.

Hugs, Bible Study, and Speakeasies: Designing for Older Adults' Multimodal Connectedness

Older adults can experience significant changes to their social networks as they age, triggering changes in their social connection practices. In this paper, we extend research on older adults' connectedness behaviors using a multimodal connectedness framing - that is, how they engage with others across platforms, devices, and modalities. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we investigate how older adults navigate a major change or infrastructural breakdown in their social routines. We conducted a survey with 146 U.S.-based older adults (65+), and follow-up interviews with a subset of 23 survey respondents. Findings revealed the resilience and innovation with which older adults adapted their behaviors across multiple modalities to maintain social relationships and playfully connect with others in person and online. Using these findings, we propose that research on designing for aging extend beyond designing for connection in the smart home;we argue for a design agenda that prioritizes designing for smart relationships with the potential to persist across spaces via multimodal connectedness. © 2021 ACM.