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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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"Everyone is Covered": Exploring the Role of Online Interactions in Facilitating Connection and Social Support in Black Churches
Faith institutions provide social support and community care for many in the United States (U.S.). Notably, churches with predominantly Black populations have served as a site for social change and care provision, historically and in contemporary society. However, the pandemic has emphasised how localising these care networks in physical spaces can limit access to social support. Information and communication technologies offer opportunities for expanding access to care in these communities. However, integrating care networks into online contexts remains a challenge for many churches, and the potential for technology to expand these networks is not well understood. Through interviews and focus groups with nine church members, we explore how hybrid faith communities that bridge offline and online contexts can enable social support and care provision. Our findings highlight care network structures in Black churches, barriers to embedding these networks online and strategies for building more seamless hybrid support systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1831755
- PAR ID:
- 10465393
- Editor(s):
- Schmidt, Albrecht; Väänänen, Kaisa; Goyal, Tesh; Kristensson, Per; Peters, Anicia; Mueller, Stefanie; Williamson, Julie; Wilson, Max
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- 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/10.1145/3544548.3581324
