Connections Among the Homeless Youth
Timeline: 4 years (1-5 months per study)
Methods: community based participatory research, interviews, ethnography, participatory design, card sorting, storyboarding
how can we design sociotechnical resources to effectively support the information work of emerging adults experiencing homelessness?
Preliminary study
GOAL #1
The goal of this project was to understand how emerging adults (aged 18-24) experiencing homelessness use technology to carry out the every day practices of the homeless shelter network (HSN).
PROCESS #1
I conducted focus groups with 25 emerging adults experiencing homelessness, comprised of a semi-structured interview protocol and a “Magical Thinking” activity. I wanted to learn more about how participants engaged with technology for their varying needs. Additionally, I conducted 9 follow up interviews to further explore participants’ design artifacts and probe further.
I then conducted a qualitative analysis of these interviews and design artifacts. I found that participants unearthed a new set of barriers in their approaches to using technology. Previous barriers, access to Wi-Fi or devices, which had prevented sheltered emerging adults from engaging with technology have since been eradicated. Initially, we implored how sheltered emerging adults incorporated technology into their daily practices to carry out the goals of the organization but found that participants were not efficiently using technology to complete activities and meet these goals because of the explicit risks. Below find several of the design artifacts used to challenge participants thinking as they drew their solutions to identified problems within the group design sessions.
KEY INSIGHTS #1
Through participants’ marginalization, the construction of their small worlds affected the flow of data and lent itself to the construction of a sociotechnical desert in which technology non-use was participants’ only option.
“I use Google for like resources and stuff, but it’s not necessarily—it’s not always helpful. They have fake sections. You don’t know if it’s real, and they make it look real. So, the whole time I am already homeless and give my information and it’s not even [to] the actual site. It’s just an asshole who wants to ruin my situation more by taking my Social Security number…And I’ve gone through a lot of processes. Even just like applying for [a job at] UPS, the whole time it wasn’t even the real website. There’s a lot of fake stuff out there. And it’s just irritating to even fill out the online application.” (Noelle)”
RECOMMENDATIONS & NEXT STEPS
Current HCI studies are not capturing inherent risks and lived experiences within current technologies with this population. Next, I began to build out the communities of knowledge that this population has to interact with - while they don’t have to share values, skills, I am looking at the sociotechnical context that surrounds them.
GOALS #2
I am seeking to understand the entire ecosystem of the homeless service network in terms of the processes and procedures required for the successful transition of its populace. I am interested in understanding how success is defined and applied throughout the intake and transitional process of emerging adults experiencing homelessness and how supportive services are engaged to aid the goal fulfillment of the organization. I plan to engage in an ethnographic study observing the staff and youth workers to better understand the social needs of both the staff and the youth. Ultimately, I hope these observations will inform efforts to improve the collaboration between the staff and emerging adults experiencing homelessness through digital tools and resources.
PROCESS #2
An ethnographic study design was adopted to shed light on the interactions and collaboration between homeless emerging adults and the Supportive Services staff within the homeless shelter. Since the focus was to understand the collaboration practices within the IHP, I primarily focused our observations on three areas that yielded the most staff and information exchange: the Case Manager’s office, Program Specialists’ office, and the milieu. Detailed fieldnotes were taken about the workflow, communication, collaboration, and technology use by both Case Managers and Program Specialists. Clients were observed indirectly, only through their interaction with our intended stakeholders.
I then performed qualitative analysis on the fieldnotes and informal interviews. I found that our stakeholders relied on boundary negotiating processes to develop a shared sense of time as opposed to relying on the boundary negotiating artifacts themselves. In HCI, much more focus is placed on the artifacts, however, little work has focused on the processes and interactions that spawn them. Here, I note several types of negotiations that impact artifact development: (1) temporality, (2) goals.