ICTs Effect on Parents Feelings of Presence, Awareness, and Connectedness during a Childs Hospitalization

📝 Abstract

This study evaluates how off-the-shelf commercial ICTs can contribute to creating a feeling of Presence, Connectedness, and Awareness between parents and their hospitalized child. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics are used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data collected through a survey of thirty eight parents whose children were admitted to the Royal Childrens Hospital. Through analysis of data, Presence is found to be less facilitated through ICT than are Awareness and Connectedness. Although participants reported that voice call on mobile phones was the most common way of communication, their ideal was a video-chat application such as Skype, or a combination of Skype and TV to facilitate feeling of Presence. A strong desire to use rich media such as video-audio to help them have a greater feeling of Presence was identified in parents responses to the questionnaire.

💡 Analysis

This study evaluates how off-the-shelf commercial ICTs can contribute to creating a feeling of Presence, Connectedness, and Awareness between parents and their hospitalized child. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics are used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data collected through a survey of thirty eight parents whose children were admitted to the Royal Childrens Hospital. Through analysis of data, Presence is found to be less facilitated through ICT than are Awareness and Connectedness. Although participants reported that voice call on mobile phones was the most common way of communication, their ideal was a video-chat application such as Skype, or a combination of Skype and TV to facilitate feeling of Presence. A strong desire to use rich media such as video-audio to help them have a greater feeling of Presence was identified in parents responses to the questionnaire.

📄 Content

Australasian Conference on Information Systems

Heidari et al. 2015, Adelaide ICT Effect on Parent Feelings During Child Hospitalization

1 ICT’s Effect on Parents’ Feelings of Presence, Awareness, and Connectedness during a Child’s Hospitalization Abbas Heidari Department of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia Email: abbasheidari@gmail.com Yahya Kazemzadeh Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics Faculty of Information Technology Monash University Caulfield, Australia Email: yahya.kazemzadeh@monash.edu
Greg Wadley Department of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia Email: greg.wadley@unimelb.edu.au Abstract This study evaluates how off-the-shelf commercial ICTs can contribute to creating a feeling of Presence, Connectedness, and Awareness between parents and their hospitalized child. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics are used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data collected through a survey of thirty eight parents whose children were admitted to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Through analysis of data, Presence is found to be less facilitated through ICT than are Awareness and Connectedness. Although participants reported that voice call on mobile phones was the most common way of communication, their ideal was a video-chat application such as Skype, or a combination of Skype and TV to facilitate feeling of Presence. We discovered a strong desire by parents to use rich media such as video and audio to achieve a greater feeling of the Presence of their absent child. Keywords
Presence, Awareness, Connectedness, Hospitalized Child 1 Introduction
Hospitalization for children is an upsetting event (Thompson 1985). Hospitalized children are under stress, as hospital is not a familiar place for them compared to home and school (Bossert 1994). Isolation from familiar home and school environment impacts the emotional wellbeing of children receiving long term hospital care (Wadley et al. 2014). Regardless of the type of illness and whether it is acute or chronic, anxious children are likely to perceive hospitalization as a highly stressful experience (Bossert 1994). The stress created by hospitalization may result in physiological symptoms such as higher temperature, pulse rate and blood pressure as well as post-operative vomiting, disturbed sleep and an extended period of recovery (Skipper and Leonard 1968). Children with chronic illness are at higher risk of behavioural and emotional problems and psychiatric disorder (Hysing et al. 2007). The effects of hospitalization are not limited to the children themselves. Families of hospitalized children also experience challenges such as feelings of isolation, fear, and anxiety regarding their child’s health. Increasing stress due to illness and hospitalization, feelings of guilt as the result of being far away, are other effects of hospitalization. Physical and geographical separation may result in difficulties in the parents’ relationship (Nicholas et al. 2011). Communication via Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has been shown to reduce stress in hospitalized children (Nicholas et al. 2011). Researchers who target the hospital domain have designed and trialled novel technologies for hospitalized children to connect to their families (Hopkins et al. 2014; Nicholas et al. 2011; Parsapour et al. 2011) and school (Green et al. 2011). Recently a Australasian Conference on Information Systems

Heidari et al. 2015, Adelaide ICT Effect on Parent Feelings During Child Hospitalization

2 variety of new commercial ICTs have become available that might be useful in this context. However, little is known about whether and how these technologies are being used by hospitalized children and their parents, nor their preferences for technology or devices. In particular, the impact of mobile smart phones and tablets has not been studied. To study how families are deploying off-the-shelf technology to maintain connections with their children in hospital, we used surveys to collect information from parents at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH), a public hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
Communication researchers have studied mediated social connection and found that a sense of Connectedness with a distant other is associated with Awareness of their activities and a sense of the their Presence. We analysed our data to discover how these phenomena are involved in media use by families in the hospital context. 2 Prior Work ICTs have been shown to be able to strengthen family bonds, expand psychological neighbourhoods, and facilitate social relationships (Wei and Lo 2006). Interpersonal ties can be maintained by mediated connections vi

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