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Understanding and Supporting Fathers and Fatherhood on Social Media Sites

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Fathers are taking on more childcare and household responsibilities than they used to and many non-profit and government organizations have pushed for changes in policies to support fathers. Despite this effort, little research has explored how fathers go online related to their roles as fathers. Drawing on an interview study with 37 fathers, we find that they use social media to document and archive fatherhood, learn how to be a father, and access social support. They also go online to support diverse family needs, such as single fathers' use of Reddit instead of Facebook, fathers raised by single mothers' search for role models online, and stay-at-home fathers' use of father blogs. However, fathers are constrained by privacy concerns and perceptions of judgment relating to sharing content online about their children. Drawing on theories of fatherhood, we present theoretical and design ideas for designing online spaces to better support fathers and fatherhood. We conclude with a call for a research agenda to support fathers online.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    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].

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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. fathers
    2. internet
    3. parents
    4. social media

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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Mod Installation as Reclaiming Representational Diversity: The Role of Aesthetic Agency in Stardew ValleyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770898:CHI PLAY(1-33)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
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