research-article

Takes a transnational network to raise a child: the case of migrant parents and left-behind Jamaican teens

Authors:

Rebecca E. GrinterAuthors Info & Claims

UbiComp '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

Pages 123 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370237

Published: 05 September 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Migration of parents, in pursuit of 'a better life', has deep roots in Caribbean history and culture. However, the separation from children that results means that care gets provided through a transnational network of caregivers and devices. In this paper we describe how mobile phones in particular have entered a complex care network and while they support some communications they have also contributed to many of the difficulties associated with migration. On the basis of our observations, we conclude with a call for future Ubicomp research into family communication to look to support parenting by considering caregiving networks as wider than just the family. Moreover, this study contributes to our thinking about what 'more' means when introducing additional technologies in family and care networks and their ability to reinforce or shift power structures in the networks in which they are embedded.

References

[1]

Bakker, C., Elings-Pels, M., and Reis, M. The Impact of Migration on Children in the Caribbean. 2009, 19.

[2]

Bennett, L. Jamaica Labrish: Jamaica Dialect Poems by Louise Bennett. 1966.

[3]

Brown, B., Taylor, A. S., Izadi, S., Sellen, A., Kaye, J. J., and Eardley, R. Locating family values: A field trial of the Whereabouts Clock. Ubicomp 2007 Ubiquitous Computing 4717, (2007), 354--371.

Digital Library

[4]

Brush, B. A. J., Inkpen, K. M., and Kimberly, T. SPARCS: exploring sharing suggestions to enhance family connectedness. CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM (2008), 629--638.

Digital Library

[5]

Burrell, J. and Anderson, K. I have great desires to look beyond my world': trajectories of information and communication technology use among Ghanaians living abroad. New Media & Society 10, 2 (2008), 203--224.

[6]

Dunn, H. S. From voice ubiquity to mobile broadband: challenges of technology transition among low-income Jamaicans. Info 11, 2 (2009), 95--111.

[7]

D'emilio, A. L., Cordero, B., Bainvel, B., et al. The Impact of International Migration: Children left behind in selected countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Wiley Online Library, New York, New York, USA, 2007.

[8]

HelpAge International. A situational analysis of migrant households in vulnerable communities in Jamaica Situational Analysis Report. Society, (2010), 63.

[9]

Horst, H. a. The blessings and burdens of communication: cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields. Global Networks 6, 2 (2006), 143--159.

[10]

Horst, H. and Miller, D. From Kinship to Link-up: Cell Phones and Social Networking in Jamaica. Current Anthropology 46, 5 (2005), 755--778.

[11]

Hutchinson, H., Mackay, W., Westerlund, B., et al. Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families. CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2003), 17--24.

Digital Library

[12]

Jokhan, M. Parental Absence as a Consequence of Migration: Exploring its Origins and Perceptuation with Special Reference to Trinidad. 2007, 1--45.

[13]

Laursen, B. and Collins, W. A. Parent-Child Communication During Adolescence. In Handbook of Family Communication. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004, 333--348.

[14]

Lucas, R. E. B. and Chappell, L. Measuring Migration's Development Impacts: Preliminary evidence from Jamaica. Development, February (2009).

[15]

Madianou, M. and Miller, D. Mobile phone parenting: Reconfiguring relationships between Filipina migrant mothers and their left-behind children. New Media & Society 13, 3 (2011), 457--470.

[16]

Miller, D. The unpredictable mobile phone. BT Technology Journal 24, 3 (2006), 41--48.

Digital Library

[17]

Modlitba, P. and Schmandt, C. Globetoddler: designing for remote interaction between preschoolers and their traveling parents. CHI '08: CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2008), 3057--3062.

Digital Library

[18]

Mynatt, E. D., Rowan, J., Jacobs, A., and Craighill, S. Digital Family Portraits?: Supporting Peace of Mind for Extended Family Members. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems pp, (2001), 333--340.

Digital Library

[19]

Palen, L., Salzman, M., and Youngs, E. Going wireless: behavior & practice of new mobile phone users. CSCW 2000, ACM (2000), 201--210.

Digital Library

[20]

Panagakos, A. N. and Horst, H. a. Return to Cyberia: technology and the social worlds of transnational migrants. Global Networks 6, 2 (2006), 109--124.

[21]

Pottinger, A. M. and Brown, S. W. Understanding the Impact of Parental Migration on Children: Implications for Counseling Families from the Caribbean. VISTAS 2006: ACA Professional Counseling Digests, (2006).

[22]

Saslis-Lagoudakis, G., Cheverst, K., Dix, A., Fitton, D., and Rouncefield, M. Hermes@Home: supporting awareness and intimacy between distant family members. OZCHI '06: Proceedings of the 18th Australia conference on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM (2006), 23--30.

Digital Library

[23]

Seidman, I. Interviewing as Qualitative Research. Teachers College Press, 2005.

[24]

Sheldon, S. B. Parents' Social Networks and Beliefs as Predictors of Parent Involvement. The Elementary School Journal 102, 4 (2002), 301.

[25]

Shklovski, I., Lindtner, S., Vertesi, J., and Dourish, P. Transnational Times: Locality, Globality and Mobility in Technology Design and Use. Computing, (2010), 515--517.

Digital Library

[26]

Smith, A., Lalonde, R. N., and Johnson, S. Serial migration and its implications for the parent-child relationship: a retrospective analysis of the experiences of the children of Caribbean immigrants. Cultural diversity ethnic minority psychology 10, 2 (2004), 107--122.

[27]

Suârez-Orozco, C., Todorova, I. L. G., and Louie, J. Making up for lost time: the experience of separation and reunification among immigrant families. Family Process 41, 4 (2002), 625--643.

[28]

Taylor, A. Out There. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems CHI 11, ACM Press (2011), 685--694.

Digital Library

[29]

Thomas-Hope, E. Current trends and issues in Caribbean migration. In Regional and International Migration in the Caribbean and Its Impacts on Sustainable Development. Trinidad and Tobago, Port-of-Spain, 2005, 53--67.

[30]

Vertesi, J., Lindtner, S., and Shklovski, I. Transnational HCI: humans, computers, and interactions in transnational contexts. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2011), 61--64.

Digital Library

[31]

Vertovec, S. Cheap Calls: The Social Glue of Migrant Transnationalism. Global Networks 4, 2 (2004), 219--224.

[32]

Williams, A., Anderson, K., and Dourish, P. Anchored Mobilities: Mobile Technology and Transnational Migration. Human Factors, (2008), 323--332.

Digital Library

[33]

Yarosh, S., Chew, Y. C. "Denise", and Abowd, G. D. Supporting parent--child communication in divorced families. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67, 2 (2009), 192--203.

Digital Library

[34]

Yarosh, S., Cuzzort, S., Müller, H., and Abowd, G. D. Developing a media space for remote synchronous parent-child interaction. IDC '09: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, ACM (2009), 97--105.

Digital Library

[35]

Caribbean Youth Development: Issues and Policy Directions. The World Bank, Washington, D. C., 2003.

Cited By

Lei YMa SSun Y(2024)Unpacking ICT-supported Social Connections and Support of Late-life Migration: From the Lens of Social ConvoysProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642898(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642898
Jin QYuan YYarosh S(2023)Socio-technical Opportunities in Long-Distance Communication Between Siblings with a Large Age DifferenceProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580720(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580720
Sabie DEkmekcioglu CAhmed S(2022)A Decade of International Migration Research in HCI: Overview, Challenges, Ethics, Impact, and Future DirectionsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/349055529:4(1-35)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490555
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Takes a transnational network to raise a child: the case of migrant parents and left-behind Jamaican teens
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

An exploration on long-distance communications between left-behind children and their parents in China
CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work

In China, hundreds of millions of migrant workers have moved to cities or coastal regions for more or better-paid jobs and have left their children behind at their rural homes. Separated by thousands of kilometers, these "left-behind" children and their ...
Technology-mediated parent-child intimacy: designing for ecuadorian families separated by migration
CHI EA '11: CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This study explores the role technology plays in supporting long-distance relationships of migrant parents and left-behind children in developing countries such as Ecuador, in order to inform the design of technology that better suits their affective ...
Association between internet addiction and suicidal ideation, suicide plans, and suicide attempts among Chinese adolescents with and without parental migration
Abstract
Many left-behind children (LBC) are emerging in rural China and growing evidence indicated that parental migration was associated with various psychological problems. However, little is known about Internet addiction and suicidal ...
Highlights
- Left-behind children (LBC) showed significantly higher prevalence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts than non-LBC.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

UbiComp '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

September 2012

1268 pages

ISBN:9781450312240

DOI:10.1145/2370216

General Chair:
Anind K. Dey
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Program Chairs:
Hao-Hua Chu
National Taiwan University, Taiwan
,
Gillian Hayes
University of California, Irvine

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

In-Cooperation

SIGSPATIAL: ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 September 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

Ubicomp '12

Sponsor:

Ubicomp '12: The 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

September 5 - 8, 2012

Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh

Acceptance Rates

UbiComp '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 301 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

UBICOMP '24

Sponsor:
sigchi
sigchi

The 2024 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

October 5 - 9, 2024

Melbourne , VIC , Australia

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

11
Total Citations
View Citations
394
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)17
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 29 Jul 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Lei YMa SSun Y(2024)Unpacking ICT-supported Social Connections and Support of Late-life Migration: From the Lens of Social ConvoysProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642898(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642898
Jin QYuan YYarosh S(2023)Socio-technical Opportunities in Long-Distance Communication Between Siblings with a Large Age DifferenceProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580720(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580720
Sabie DEkmekcioglu CAhmed S(2022)A Decade of International Migration Research in HCI: Overview, Challenges, Ethics, Impact, and Future DirectionsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/349055529:4(1-35)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490555
Fisher K(2022)People First, Data Second: A Humanitarian Research Framework for Fieldwork with Refugees by War ZonesComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-022-09425-831:2(237-297)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10606-022-09425-8
Tsai CGui XKou YCarroll J(2021)With Help from Afar: Cross-Local Communication in an Online COVID-19 Pandemic CommunityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34760625:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3476062
Gan YGreiffenhagen CReeves SBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)Connecting Distributed Families: Camera Work for Three-party Mobile Video CallsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376704(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376704
Fisher KYafi EMaitland CXu YTellioglu HTeli MNathan L(2019)Al OsoolProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities10.1145/3328320.3328395(273-282)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328320.3328395
Hsiao JDillahunt T(2018)Technology to Support Immigrant Access to Social Capital and Adaptation to a New CountryProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32743392:CSCW(1-21)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274339
Zhou RWen ZTang MDiSalvo BMival OSmyth MDalsgaard P(2017)Navigating Media UseProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/3064663.3064701(1025-1037)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3064663.3064701
Yarosh SSchoenebeck SKothaneth SBales EKaye JDruin ALampe CMorris DHourcade J(2016)"Best of Both Worlds"Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858210(635-647)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858210
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents