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Churches play a major role in providing social support to address health inequities within Black communities, in part by connecting members to key organizations and services. While public health has a history of disseminating interventions in faith communities, little work has explored the use of crowdsourcing to tailor interventions to the unique culture of each church community. Following Community Based Participatory Research principles, we partnered with two predominantly Black churches, and report on a series of three participatory design sessions with nine participants. We developed a novel storyboarding method to explore how crowdsourcing could promote health in these faith-based communities. Our findings characterize existing supports within the church community, and how church social structures impact member access to these supports. We further identify motivations to engage with a church-situated health application, and how these motivations translate to crowdsourcing tasks. Finally, we discuss considerations for public health crowdsourcing tasks.
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Community Dynamics in Technospiritual Interventions: Lessons Learned from a Church-based mHealth Pilot
HCI researchers have increasingly examined how social context shapes health behaviors. Much of this work operates at the interpersonal level. Communities such as churches play important roles in supporting wellbeing and addressing health inequities. While some work has investigated creating digital health tools for religious populations, few have explicitly focused on the incorporation of community support in the form of prayer support. Embedding health interventions in any community has the potential to support or challenge the community’s dynamics. We report on findings from interviews with 17 church members who used a church-based mHealth application over a 4-week period and provide guidelines for developers based on these results. Through their use of the system, participants characterized several community dynamics including a desire for social intimacy, communicating care, creating opportunities for fellowship, maintaining privacy and discretion, and building community connections, and how these dynamics influence their aspirations for a church-based health app.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1831755
- PAR ID:
- 10376103
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- 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
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517700
