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Affective Needs in Context: Long-distance Relationships Between International Students and Their Family

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Affective Needs in Context: Long-distance Relationships Between International Students and Their Family

Case study about the impact of technology on affective needs

Context

From January to April 2018, I worked on a case study that focused on technological impact on affective needs in the context of long-distance relationships between international students and their families. This study consists of two parts: (1) a qualitative study, conducted as part of a team of six, and (2) an individual analysis of the findings and future directions of technology. This project was part of my MSc Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Interaction module.

This article summarises a University assignment paper. You can check the original paper with in depth analysis and references as PDF.

Emotion’s role in technology

Affective Computing or Interaction aims to bridge the gap between human emotions and technologies. It has been demonstrated that emotion plays a critical role in our judgement and adaptive regulation of thought. In this article, “affective states”, refers to moods and emotions as embodied reactions or pleasure or displeasure towards something. This is expressed over multiple systems of an organism. For example, not just having happy thoughts and feelings, but also expressing them in the face, body or actions.

Empathy as a tool for understanding experience

When we use technology, we make sense of it, we have certain expectations and biases, but we also feel something towards it. And this also dictates how we use said technology. There are design or theoretical frameworks aimed to support understanding and assessment of emotions in design.

This study applies McCarthy and Wright’s Technology as Experience theoretical framework to understand students’ subjective experience and their affective states when using technology to stay in touch with their families from abroad. The framework is based on the appraisal theory and proposes four threads of holistic experience:

Additionally, there are six sense-making processes: anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, approaching, recounting.

Furthermore, the team consisted of international students which meant we could use our own ethnographic experience to inform the study. We used auto-ethnography to apply this theory on our experiences. As a result, we developed a semi-structured interview to understand people’s perceptions and experiences of this topic.

As people’s ability to self-report their emotions can be limited, we also applied a think-aloud approach where we asked participants to show us how they interact with their most used technology to contact their family. The think-aloud approach is aimed at the user's interaction behaviour as well as their rationale behind it, and it reinforces reappraisal and helps users verbalise their affective states. Additionally, to enhance reappraisal, we asked participants to focus on a specific time they tried to contact their family and to try to describe how they felt by guiding them with open-ended questions.

Making sense of the data

We interviewed 10 international students from UCL, which were contacted directly and asked to take part in our study. Data analysis was conducted through thematic analysis. Interviews were recorded and transcribed immediately after the session. Each of us performed thematic analysis to define codes and work towards unifying them and discussing what themes emerge from this. We went through an iterative process to refine our findings and formed an affinity diagram to help visualise the themes, concepts and relationships.

Our research found that living far from family can impose some difficulties amongst international students. Homesickness is an affective need that was amongst most prevalent themes and evidence of frustration with technology was found. Additionally, we identified technological barriers such as limited network connection, limited technology experience of the participant’s family, and non-technological barriers such as unaccommodating time zones. Our participants reported they use mostly mobile apps, which means that spatio-temporal aspects are crucial to making a pleasant experience.

Please refer to the paper if you’d like to see the entire data analysis with quotes, and full interpretation of the findings.