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COVID-19 has been a sustained and global crisis with a strong continual impact on daily life. Staying accurately informed about COVID-19 has been key to personal and communal safety, especially for essential workers— individuals whose jobs have required them to go into work throughout the pandemic—as their employment has exposed them to higher risks of contracting the virus. Through 14 semi-structured interviews, we explore how essential workers across industries navigated the COVID-19 information landscape to get up-to-date information in the early months of the pandemic. We find that essential workers living through a sustained crisis have a broad set of information needs. We summarize these needs in a framework that centers 1) fulfilling job requirements, 2) assessing personal risk, and 3) keeping up with crisis news coverage. Our findings also show that the sustained nature of COVID-19 crisis coverage led essential workers to experience breaking points and develop coping strategies. Additionally, we show how workplace communications may act as a mediating force in this process: lack of adequate information in the workplace caused workers to struggle with navigating a contested information landscape, while consistent updates and information exchanges at work could ease the stress of information overload. Our findings extend the crisis informatics field by providing contextual knowledge about the information needs of essential workers during a sustained crisis.
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This content will become publicly available on April 25, 2026
Normalizing Grit: The Futility of Personal Informatics for Farm Workers and Climate Change
California’s agricultural workers are a vulnerable population due to their undocumented status and poor working conditions. This paper describes community engagement with NGO workers, farm laborers, and farm owners to identify and address the effects of climate change, namely heat stress, on, strawberry field workers. We deployed personal informatics devices in a longitudinal study with three field workers for a month and a half and presented the collected statistics back to them, asking them to reflect on their personal health (e.g., exposure to heat stress) and work data. We found that field workers normalized grit - the irregularity, adversity, competitiveness, and helplessness of their labor - thereby limiting the promise of personal informatics to help users lead healthier lives. Implicitly, personal informatics supports white collar workers such as information workers; overall, however, our study suggests a mismatch between current designs and front-line work which involve intensive physical work requirements.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2208631
- PAR ID:
- 10618285
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400713941
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Yokohama Japan
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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