Low-income parents’ values involving the use of technology for accessing health information

Abstract

Technology is increasingly available to end users of low socioeconomic status (SES), yet little is known about how these users’ values affect the interfaces they prefer when seeking information related to their child’s health. We investigate low-SES parents’ preferences when it comes to technology to track and learn about their child’s developmental milestones using both qualitative and quantitative analyses. We follow the methods outlined by Value Sensitive Design (VSD) and found that the three most relevant values for information seeking are Convenience, Learning/Bonding and Trust. We also discuss how these values drive their technology preferences in tracking their child’s developmental milestones. We also present a series of design principles for information communication technology for low-SES user groups that were derived directly from our qualitative research with 51 participants. We note that although working in this unique problem space necessitated following an abridged VSD paradigm our results align with the core set of values suggested by VSD.