research-article

Connecting Distributed Families: Camera Work for Three-party Mobile Video Calls

Authors:

Christian Greiffenhagen,

Stuart ReevesAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376704

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile video calling technologies have become a critical link to connect distributed families. However, these technologies have been principally designed for video calling between two parties, whereas family video calls involve young children often comprise three parties, namely a co-present adult (a parent or grandparent) helping with the interaction between the child and another remote adult. We examine how manipulation of phone cameras and management of co-present children is used to stage parent-child interactions. We present results from a video-ethnographic study based on 40 video recordings of video calls between 'left-behind' children and their migrant parents in China. Our analysis reveals a key practice of 'facilitation work', performed by grandparents, as a crucial feature of three-party calls. Facilitation work offers a new concept for HCI's broader conceptualisation of mobile video calling, suggesting revisions that design might take into consideration for triadic interactions in general.

Supplementary Material

SRT File (paper575pvc.srt)

Preview video captions

Download
.54 KB

MP4 File (paper575pv.mp4)

Preview video

Download
4.75 MB

References

[1]

ACWF (All China Women's Federation). 2013. Research report on the situation of rural left-behind China, rural-urban migration children in China. Zhong Guo Fu Yun (Chinese Women's Movement), 6, 30--34. [in Chinese]

[2]

Morgan G. Ames, Janet Go, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, and Mirjana Spasojevic. 2010. Making love in the network closet: the benefits and work of family videochat. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 145--154.

Digital Library

[3]

Rafael Ballagas, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Morgan Ames, Janet Go, and Hayes Raffle. 2009. Family communication: phone conversations with children. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '09). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 321--324.

Digital Library

[4]

Deana Brown and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2012. Takes a transnational network to raise a child: the case of migrant parents and left-behind Jamaican teens. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '12). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 123--132.

Digital Library

[5]

CMDS (China Migrants Dynamic Survey). 2017. Report on Chinese Migrants. National Health and Family Planning Commission. Retrieved from: chinaldrk.org.cn/wjw/#/data/classify/population/provinceList [in Chinese]

[6]

Sean Follmer, Hayes Raffle, Janet Go, Rafael Ballagas, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2010. Video play: playful interactions in video conferencing for long-distance families with young children. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '10). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 49--58.

Digital Library

[7]

Azadeh Forghani and Carman Neustaedter. 2014. The routines and needs of grandparents and parents for grandparent-grandchild conversations over distance. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 4177--4186.

Digital Library

[8]

Harold Garfinkel. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood-Cliffs, NJ, USA.

[9]

William Gaver, Abigail Sellen, Christian Heath, and Paul Luff. 1993. One is not enough: Multiple views in a media space. In Proceedings of the INTERACT'93 and CHI'93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, NY, NY, USA, 335--341.

Digital Library

[10]

Christian Heath and Paul Luff. 1993. Disembodied conduct: Interactional asymmetries in video-mediated communication. In Graham Button (ed.) Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology. Routledge, London, UK, 35--54.

[11]

Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh, and Paul Luff. 2010. Video in Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

[12]

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila Ernestine. 1997. 'I'm here, but I'm there': the meanings of Latina transnational motherhood. Gender & Society, 11(5), 548--571.

[13]

Tamara Jacka. 2018. Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework. The Journal of Peasant Studies. 7 (45), 1341--1359.

[14]

Clare Kelly. 2015. 'Let's do some jumping together': Intergenerational participation in the use of remote technology to co-construct social relations over distance. Journal of Early Childhood Research. 13(1). 29--46.

[15]

David S Shelby Kirk, Abigail Sellen, and Xiang Cao. 2010. Home video communication: mediating 'closeness'. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 135--144.

Digital Library

[16]

Christian Licoppe and Julien Morel. 2012. Video-ininteraction: 'Talking heads' and the multimodal organization of mobile and Skype video calls. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(4), 399--429.

[17]

Christian Licoppe and Julien Morel, J. 2014. Mundane video directors in interaction: Showing one's environment in Skype and mobile video calls. In Broth, M., Laurier, E., & Mondada, L. (Eds.), Studies of Video Practices: Video at Work. Routledge, London, UK, 135--160.

[18]

Christian Licoppe. 2017. Showing objects in Skype video-mediated conversations: From showing gestures to showing sequences. Journal of Pragmatics, 110, 63--82.

[19]

Christian Licoppe, Paul Luff, Christian Heath, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Naomi Yamashita, and Sylvaine Tuncer. 2017. Showing Objects: Holding and Manipulating Artefacts in Video-mediated Collaborative Settings. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 5295--5306.

Digital Library

[20]

Paul Luff and Christian Heath. 1998. Mobility in Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '98). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 305--314.

Digital Library

[21]

Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Routledge, London, UK.

[22]

Elisabeth McClure and Rachel Barr. 2017. Building family relationships from a distance: Supporting connections with babies and toddlers using video and video chat. In Rachel Barr & Deborah Nichols Linebarger (Eds.), Media Exposure During Infancy and Early Childhood. Springer, New York, NY, USA, 227--248.

[23]

Carman Neustaedter and Saul Greenberg. 2012. Intimacy in long-distance relationships over video chat. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 753--762.

Digital Library

[24]

Rhacel Salazar Parreñ as. 2001. Mothering from a distance: Emotions, gender, and intergenerational relations in Filipino transnational families. Feminist Studies, 27(2), 361--390.

[25]

Harvey Sacks. 1992. Lectures in Conversation. Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

[26]

Emanuel A Schegloff. 1995. Parties and talking together: Two ways in which numbers are significant for talk-in-interaction. In Paul Ten Have and George Psathas. (Eds.), Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Action. University of America Press, Lanham, MD, USA, 31--42.

[27]

Leah Schmalzbauer. 2004. Searching for wages and mothering from afar: The case of Honduran transnational families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(5), 1317--1331.

[28]

Alfred Schutz. 1962. Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands.

[29]

Chiho Sunakawa. 2012. Japanese family via webcam: An ethnographic study of cross-spatial interactions. In JSAI International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Springer, Berlin, Germany, 264--276. Berlin: Springer.

[30]

Chiho Sunakawa. 2014. Virtual ie: A threegenerational household mediated by webcam interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 69, 63--81.

[31]

Amy Voida, Stephen Voida, Saul Greenberg, and Helen Ai He. 2008. Asymmetry in media spaces. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '08). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 313--322.

Digital Library

[32]

Raelene Wilding. 2006. 'Virtual' intimacies? Families communicating across transnational contexts. Global Networks, 6(2), 125--142.

[33]

Hongwei Xu and Yu Xie. 2015. The causal effects of rural-to-urban migration on children's well-being in China. European Sociological Review, 31(4), 502--519.

[34]

Svetlana Yarosh and Gregory Abowd. 2011. Mediated parent-child contact in work-separated families. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 1185--1194.

Digital Library

[35]

Svetlana Yarosh, Stephen Cuzzort, Hendrik Mü ller, and Gregory D. Abowd. 2009. Developing a media space for remote synchronous parent-child interaction. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '09). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 97--105.

Digital Library

[36]

Svetlana Yarosh and Mark Robert Kwikkers. 2011. Supporting pretend and narrative play over videochat. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '11). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 217--220.

Digital Library

[37]

Jingzhong Ye and James Murray. 2005. Left-behind children in rural China: Impact study of rural labor migration on left-behind children in mid-west China. Social Sciences Academic Press, Beijing, China.

[38]

Jingzhong Ye and Pan, L. 2011. Differentiated childhoods: impacts of rural labor migration on leftbehind children in China. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(2), 355--377.

[39]

Rui Zhou, Zhonghe Wen, Muchao Tang, and Betsy DiSalvo. 2017. Navigating Media Use: Chinese Parents and Their Overseas Adolescent Children on WeChat. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17). ACM, NY, NY, USA, 1025--1037.

Digital Library

Cited By

Seuren LShaw S(2024)How Informal Carers Support Video Consulting in Physiotherapy, Heart Failure, and Cancer: Qualitative Study Using Linguistic EthnographyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5169526(e51695)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/51695
Yuan YJin QMills CYarosh SNeustaedter C(2024)Designing Collaborative Technology for Intergenerational Social Play over DistanceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870318:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687031
Kelly RXing YBaker SWaycott J(2024)"More Than Just Holding the iPad": Family Members' Perspectives on the Work of Video Calling in Aged CareProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870078:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687007
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Connecting Distributed Families: Camera Work for Three-party Mobile Video Calls
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

Recommendations

Supporting parent-child interaction in divorced families
IDC '08: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children

Divorce affects a significant number of children and parents. In this work, I discuss the challenges that these families may face and present two systems that may help address some of these challenges. Finally, I highlight the expected contributions of ...
Mediated parent-child contact in work-separated families
CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Parents and children in families living with regular separation due to work develop strategies to manage being apart. We interviewed 14 pairs of parents and children (ages 7 -- 13) from work-separated families to understand their experiences and the ...
Mediated intimacy in families: understanding the relation between children and parents
IDC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Interaction design and children

Mediating intimacy between children and their parents is still limited investigated and at the same time, we find that, emerging technologies are about to change and affect the way we interact with each other. In this paper, we report from an empirical ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2020

10688 pages

ISBN:9781450367080

DOI:10.1145/3313831

General Chairs:
Regina Bernhaupt
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller
Monash University, Australia
,
David Verweij
Newcastle University, UK
,
Josh Andres
RMIT, Australia
,
Program Chairs:
Joanna McGrenere
University of British Columbia, Canada
,
Andy Cockburn
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
,
Ignacio Avellino
University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
,
Alix Goguey
Grenoble Alpes University, France
,
Pernille Bjørn
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
,
Shengdong (Shen) Zhao
National University of Singapore, Singapore
,
Briane Paul Samson
Future University Hakodate, Japan & De La Salle University, Philippines
,
Rafal Kocielnik
University of Washington, USA

Copyright © 2020 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 the author(s) 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

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 April 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Badges

Best Paper

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

ICS Mok Hing Cheong Postgraduate Scholarship (CUHK)
Direct Grant for Research (CUHK)
UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Conference

CHI '20

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 25 - 30, 2020

HI, Honolulu, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

29
Total Citations
View Citations
1,070
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)144
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)21

Reflects downloads up to 12 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Seuren LShaw S(2024)How Informal Carers Support Video Consulting in Physiotherapy, Heart Failure, and Cancer: Qualitative Study Using Linguistic EthnographyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5169526(e51695)Online publication date: 31-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/51695
Yuan YJin QMills CYarosh SNeustaedter C(2024)Designing Collaborative Technology for Intergenerational Social Play over DistanceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870318:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687031
Kelly RXing YBaker SWaycott J(2024)"More Than Just Holding the iPad": Family Members' Perspectives on the Work of Video Calling in Aged CareProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870078:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687007
Zhang LYuan YLi JCassinelli AZhu K(2024)WhisperCup: A Design Exploration for Improving the Remote Communication between Chinese Parents and Their Adult Children through Digitally-Augmented Everyday ObjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765348:MHCI(1-26)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676534
Núñez-Pacheco CBeuthel JGarrett RTsaknaki VKoulidou N(2024)Designing [Im]Material Inventories of Nomadic BelongingsCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3658380(401-404)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656156.3658380
Yuan YGenatempo PJin QYarosh S(2024)Field Trial of a Tablet-based AR System for Intergenerational Connections through Remote ReadingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36536968:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653696
Shakeri HYuan YAxtell BGeiskkovitch DNeustaedter C(2024)Designing Smart Home Technology For Passive Co-Presence Over DistanceProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661508(3389-3406)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661508
Shakeri HNeustaedter C(2024)Passive Co-presence: Exploring How Peripheral Devices Connect People Over DistanceExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651126(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3651126
Lei YMa SSun Y(2024)Unpacking ICT-supported Social Connections and Support of Late-life Migration: From the Lens of Social ConvoysProceedings of the 2024 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
Chen BLi X(2024)Understanding Socio-technical Opportunities for Enhancing Communication Between Older Adults and their Remote FamilyProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642318(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642318
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.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents