Home care workers (HCWs) provide essential care in patients' homes but are often underappreciated and work in stressful and isolated environments with diverse and intersecting support needs. This paper describes a computer-mediated peer support program that centers around sharing circles: spaces for personal, narrative storytelling to encourage HCWs to collaboratively reflect on their home care experiences and build rapport and shared identity with their peers. We describe the design of this program and a 12-week deployment that we conducted to evaluate the program with 42 HCWs in New York City. Our findings show that participants engaged in multiple types of peer support including emotional validation, learning how to navigate the workplace and patient care, defining and enabling good home care praxis, and building understanding around purpose and identity as HCWs. We discuss how these findings inform the design of technology and use of holistic pedagogies, such as storytelling, to enable this support in computer-mediated peer support programs. Such programs can help researchers and practitioners interested in addressing diverse needs that occur in intersectional contexts, such as that of HCWs and other marginalized populations.
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Computer-Mediated Peer Support Needs of Home Care Workers: Emotional Labor & the Politics of Professionalism
Home care workers (HCWs) are increasingly central to post-acute and long-term health services in the United States. Despite being a critical component of the day-to-day care of home-dwelling adults, these workers often feel underappreciated and isolated on the job and come from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. Leveraging the support of peers is one potential way to empower HCWs, but peer support encompasses a broad range of activities and aspects. Traditional conceptions of workplace support may not be appropriate to the home care context, as HCWs are a distributed workforce who have few opportunities to interact with each other. In this study, we explore how HCWs value and conceptualize peer support. Our findings demonstrate the importance of peer support in performing the emotional labor of home care work and ongoing attempts to strategically frame the home care profession as essential and medical in nature. Our results ground design implications for technology-enabled peer support based on the power dynamics of our participants' context and allow us to engage with issues where technology design for empowerment intersects with exploitation in distributed or crowd work, emotional labor, and tacit knowledge.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2026577
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10347429
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 32
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3476077
