Investigating the effective factors of communication for family members living apart

Abstract

Parents have difficulty in communicating with their independent children that live separately. Much research has focused on this problem and most solutions provide parents' information to the children, despite the parents' desire to understand their children. To foster communication by the parent, our proposal takes the unique approach of providing the children's information to the parent. As an initial experiment, we conduct a 15 day field study with three households to investigate whether the information of the children prompts parent into communicating with their children, and if so, how and what information should be shared. The result show that little information can prompt communication by the parent and keep a favorable attitude toward the child. We also discuss the design requirements raised by our findings with the goal of improving communication between family members living apart. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.