Congratulations to CDT Digital Health and Care cohort 1 students Joe Matthews, Romana Burgess, Bridget Ellis and Morgan Jenkinson who have published their paper 'Fathers, Young Children and Technology: Changes in Device Use and Family Dynamics during the COVID-19 UK Lockdown' in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. This paper was co-authored with Dr Amid Ayobi, Professor Esther Dermott, Dr Aisling O'Kane. 

We spoke to CDT student Romana Burgess about the paper:

"The coronavirus lockdown measures meant that families spent more time together than ever before, thanks to the shift to online schooling and working from home. By speaking with fathers during this time of stress, uncertainty, and change, we looked to understand changing perceptions of technology use and fatherhood, and we began to consider the design of father-supporting technologies to support fathers.

Our work involved two phases of semi-structured interviews, with participants recruited through social media and word of mouth. The first interviews (n=19) broadly discussed technology and home life during the pandemic, and fathers highlighted challenges in screen viewing, family dynamics, activity idea generation and self-care. Informed by these challenges, we designed four prototype apps which were used as prompts in follow-up interviews (n=12) to better understand the issues in more depth.

Overall, the interviews identified significant changes and concerns related to technology use within the context of COVID-19. Fathers found themselves with changing responsibilities (e.g., home schooling, more childcare), which conflicted with their typical and traditional responsibilities (e.g., work, chores). Combined with pandemic-led stressors, these issues together amplified negative feelings associated with children’s technology use and the father’s own self-care."

The research for this publication was initated as part of the CDT's taught unit Digital Health Group Interaction Design Project in 2019/20. More information about the taught component of the CDT can be found in the Programme Catalogue. 

The paper can be downloaded from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555188.