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Design Challenges for Reconnecting in Later Life: A Qualitative Study

Published: 30 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we take a step back and explore reconnection --find out about or re-contact old friends, an emerging topic due to the increased use of computer-mediated technology by older adults to maintain friendships and form new ones. We report on our findings from semi-structured interviews with 28 individuals from Costa Rica and Poland. The interviews aimed to explore whether there is a wish to reconnect, and the challenges encountered by older adults to reconnect. We contribute with design considerations for tools allowing older adults to reconnect, discussing opportunities for technology.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Guidelines for Designing Social Networking Sites for Older Adults: A Systematic Review with Thematic SynthesisACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/361566216:3(1-23)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2023

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  1. Design Challenges for Reconnecting in Later Life: A Qualitative Study

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIS '18 Companion: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems
    May 2018
    436 pages
    ISBN:9781450356312
    DOI:10.1145/3197391
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 30 May 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. design challenges
    2. older adults
    3. qualitative study
    4. reconnection
    5. social networks

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    DIS '18 Companion Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 487 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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    View all
    • (2023)Guidelines for Designing Social Networking Sites for Older Adults: A Systematic Review with Thematic SynthesisACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/361566216:3(1-23)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2023

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