Examining the Use of Thematic Analysis as a Tool for Informing Design of New Family Communication Technologies

Frequently family members are geographically separated for large parts of the day. This separation, allied to a busy schedule, can make it difficult to share daily experiences and maintain the feeling of connectedness. This paper describes an exploratory study to investigate family dynamics and the use of technology in families with primary school children. We interviewed five families about their daily communication and use of technology. We examined the use of thematic analysis, a method for qualitative data analysis used in social science, as a tool for systematically identifying and describing features of qualitative data and informing the design of new family technologies. The results of the investigation showed that the first 3 phases of the 6-phase thematic analysis approach were the most fruitful in yielding information about the families’ use of technology and information at a level that could be of value for designing new communications technology. The use of the full 6 phases of the approach however, is more appropriate where it is required to produce a summary of the data in a form of a high level thematic map accompanied by the analytic narrative.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Nela Brown

Tony Stockman

Conference

Publication date: September 2013

Publication date (Print): September 2013

Pages: 1-6

Affiliations

[0001]Queen Mary University of London

School of EECS

Peter Landin Building

10 Godward Square

London E1 4FZ, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2013.30

SO-VID: f39b4ae4-67ed-4ed0-b836-d69bbd3bc8b7

Copyright statement: © Nela Brown et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 27th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013), Brunel University, London, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: 27th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013)

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 27

Conference location: Brunel University, London, UK

Conference date: 9 - 13 September 2013

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013)

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2013.30

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Examining the Use of Thematic Analysis as a Tool for Informing Design of New Family Communication Technologies

Abstract