Digital epiphanies: Work and family in a digital age

This post, written by one of the project team, Prof Natasha Mauthner, was originally posted on the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships blog in June 2013. CRFR is a consortium research centre for researchers interested in families and relationships working across several Scottish universities.

When I tell people that I am doing a research project on how digital technologies are reshaping our work and family lives, everyone has a story to tell.

A mother I meet on holiday in a youth hostel says that while her partner takes their three children skiing, she uses her day to clear emails, catch up on work and generally get ahead of herself for when she returns to the office.

Another mother explains that while her husband – who travels a lot for work – was physically present with the family during the Christmas holiday he was mentally absent, glued to his computer and iphone even when engaged in family activities.

While one father bemoans the fact that his wife spent their summer holiday ‘on the blackberry the whole time’, another tells me he finds the idea of having a holiday without wifi unimaginable. Gesturing to the smartphone that he is holding, he tells me his digital devices have become ‘part of my body’.

What questions do these anecdotal stories prompt?

• Are people’s use of digital devices challenging not only the traditional separation between work and home, but also that between work and leisure?
• Is ‘the holiday’, as we have come to know it in recent historical times, undergoing change?
• Who stands to gain or lose from these shifts? Employers, employees, families, men, women, children?
• Are these changes contested by some while accepted and even embraced by others?

These are some of the questions that colleagues and I are exploring in a project, Digital Epiphanies … read the full post here.

 

Natasha Mauthner & the DE team

 

What does ‘Work-Life Balance’ mean anyway?

The Digital Epiphanies project was born at an event entitled ‘Achieving work-life balance in a digitally dependent world’. When I started to work on the Digital Epiphanies project earlier this year, one thing that became very clear to me, very quickly, was that the term ‘work-life balance’ is conceptually problematic for range of reasons.

Firstly each word is individually ambiguous, multi-faceted and contentious, secondly the meaning of the overall term is conceptually problematic to frame and thirdly it is not obvious that, even if the terms were defined clearly and rigorously, such ‘balance’ is possible, meaningful or desirable.

Examples of issues which arise when one starts to think about the term include:

• Work – what is meant by or included in ‘work’? Only paid work? What about unpaid activities associated with paid work? Does a focus on paid work unjustifiably devalue ‘house work’ and informal caring work that is unpaid? How about voluntary community work, unpaid internships, training and education?
• Life – assuming this can be seen as distinct from ‘work’ (e.g. paid work), the rest of life includes a myriad of quite different things from managing and maintaining a household to working for personal or political causes to spending time with distant family and friends. These are themselves aspects of ‘life’ that are often highly problematic to ‘balance’, why then focus only on the balance between ‘work’ and ‘life’?
• Balance – what is being balanced and what does or could balance mean? Guest [1] notes that there are a range of metaphorical interpretations and implications of the term. For example, as a noun ‘balance’ may mean a variety of things such as the balance of weights on scales, bank balance or balance of payments, balance or unbalance of mind, or balance of power, balance in homeostatic processes and balance of justice as illustrated by the ubiquitous symbol of the scales of justice. As a verb it can mean the act of weighing or comparing, to keep in equilibrium, to settle an account and more. The meaning of ‘balance’ is critical to understanding the whole term. For example if we mean ‘weighed against’ then the implication is that ‘work’ and ‘life’ can be [completely] separated and weighed against each other. Is such a separation possible? What would such a balance look like?

In most academic publications on the topic, the problematic nature of the term/terms is generally noted and explored or sometimes sidestepped. One manifestation of the multiple perspectives on the meanings of the term is the large range of related terms used to describe aspects of work-life balance. The specific terms used depend on the perspectives and specific foci of those writing. In the first few months of the project I collected a large list, for example:

• Harmonizing paid work with other parts of life
• Role-balance/overload
• Work-life Alignment
• Work-family (or Work/Family) Balance
• Work-family conflict
• Work-life integration
• Integrating work and family
• Work Interference with Family (WIF) & Family Interference with Work (FIW)
• Work-family relationship
• Balance outside [of] work demands with … work
• Work-life blend
• Work-family enrichment
• Work-family facilitation
• Work-life reconciliation
• Work/Family Jigsaw

These and other terms illustrate the rich range of perspectives, the multi-faceted nature and the complexity of the ‘problem’ that is broadly called work-life balance. The Digital Epiphanies projects are collectively working to understand the roles that digital technologies play within that many faceted and complex problem.

[1] Guest, D.E. Perspectives on the Study of Work-life Balance. Social Science Information 41, 2 (2002), 255–279.

Paul and the D.E. team

Epiphanies of a Remote Worker

This post was originally posted on Marieke Guy’s blog Ramblings of a Remote Worker, in June 2013…

An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, “manifestation”) is an experience of sudden and striking realization. Generally the term is used to describe scientific breakthrough, religious or philosophical discoveries, but it can apply in any situation in which an enlightening realization allows a problem or situation to be understood from a new and deeper perspective ( Wikipedia ).

I think we’ve all had an epiphany at some point or other – and many of us have had this moment of understanding about the environment we are working in. I think for me the last 5 years of working from home have allowed me many different insights into how we work as individuals and in teams, and our relationship with technology.

A new project called Digital Epiphanies is exploring the (many) roles of ICT in the context of ‘work-life balance’. It is a Digital Economy programme funded project (via EPSRC) under the broad heading of ‘Achieving Work-life balance in a digitally dependent world’, which is seen as a challenge area of ‘Sustainable Society’.

“The advances in technology in recent years have had many positive effects on the ways in which people can combine work and personal life. For example, being able to access email via a smartphone means that many can work from home, or work a flexible work pattern that successfully fits around caring responsibilities. However, the resulting “always-online” culture in which people expect almost instant responses to email messages, brings stresses and strains to those who feel under pressure to respond immediately and be available on a 24/7 basis….Despite widespread and proliferating debates about the impacts of digital technologies on work-life balance, few empirical studies have explored how these technologies are being used and what impact their use is having on people’s work and personal lives. This project seeks to enhance our understanding of the paradoxical and double-edged effects that new technologies and digital practices are having on work-life balance through two central objectives.”

So far the project has produced two useful publications:

• Zhou, Y., Bird, J., Cox, A. L. and Brumby, D. (2013) Estimating Usage Can Reduce the Stress of Social Networking. Personal Informatics Workshop (CHI’13) PDF
• Stawarz, K., Cox, A. L., Bird, J. and Benedyk, R. (2013) “I’d Sit at Home and Do Work Emails”: How Tablets Affect the Work-Life Balance of Office Workers. CHI Extended Abstracts 2013, 1383-1388. PDF

A former colleague of mine – Paul Shabajee, who I worked with on Greening Events, is one of the researchers, and I’m going to be interviewed for the project. The interview is in part about the roles of technology but also will aim to identify wider factors that play a role – from individual to global scales, with the medium term goal of identifying potentially positive roles for digital technologies at the various levels.

I’m thrilled to be able to help with this exciting and ground breaking project and will let you know about the outcomes.

Marieke Guy

What is a ‘Digital Epiphany’?

 

The research project is called ‘Digital Epiphanies’ – but what do we mean by that term?

Well, earlier in the year, members of our project team wrote a paper for the Habits Workshop at the British Human Computer Interaction conference at Brunel University which addressed just this question.

The idea is that the way we live and work now is often intertwined with digital technologies, and these can both lead to behaviours we would like to change (e.g. working at home in the evenings) or just make it difficult to assess our own behaviour (we might think we are spending far too much time on Facebook at work, whereas in fact it is not that much time). At the same time, digital technologies can give us the tools to more accurately monitor our real behaviour and feed it back to us.

“Our thesis is that accurate self-knowledge is power and that using personal informatics (PI) tools … can result in ‘digital epiphanies’ where people gain insights into their own and other people’s habits that can potentially lead to beneficial attitude and behaviour changes.” (Cox, Bird & Fleck, Habits Workshop paper, British HCI 2013)

Two types of ‘epiphany’ are discussed in the paper. The first is a ‘change epiphany’ where monitoring of behaviour leads to identification of something someone wants to do differently, but the second is an ‘acceptance epiphany’ where monitoring leads to a decision that things are OK as they are. In one study (link to paper here), they found that when students had a more accurate picture of how long they were spending on social networking sites (less than they thought) they were significantly less stressed and more satisfied with their use of social networking. The students had an acceptance epiphany: their attitudes changed and they accepted their current behaviour.

The full 4-page Habits Workshop paper can be found here.

So, do you think you’ve ever had a ‘digital epiphany’?

Until next time!

Rosie, Anna, Jon, Rowanne & the DE team

 

Welcome Marta and Emily

This month, the Digital Epiphanies project welcomes two new additions to the UCL team.

Marta Cecchinato has just started her Ph.D. in the department having completed her BSc and MSc at the University of Padova in Italy. Her thesis was on multimodal feedback for touchless interactions. Dr Emily Collins has joined the team as a Research Associate. Her previous work has focused on both the beneficial and detrimental effects of digital games (including problematic digital game use) and how they can be used to improve work/life balance.

British HCI Conference

We had the opportunity to present a total of four papers at the British HCI Conference, three of as part of the Habits workshop.

Bradley, Brumby, Cox and Bird (2013) presented the paper ” How to manage your inbox: Is a once a day strategy best?”. Seven academics spent one week trialing e-mail strategies that involved either frequent checking or checking only once a day. The latter strategy resulted in less time spent reading and responding to e-mail than the former, suggesting that this may be a useful tactic when attempting to improve productivity.

E-mail habits were also addressed in Brumby, Cox and Bird’s (2013) position paper, also arguing for a once-a-day approach to e-mail.

Cox, Bird and Fleck (2013) presented their work on how digital epiphanies can be encouraged through more accurate self perceptions of technology use. The paper discusses a number of examples of digital epiphanies and how personal informatics encouraged self reflection and ultimately, self knowledge.

Finally, Shabajee and Priest’s (2013) paper, “Digitally Assisted Life-(Im)Balance?” argues for the complexity of work-life balance, discussing the need for the devlopment of methods intended to identify factors both positive and negative digital behaviours.

Personal Informatics Workshop, CHI’13

One of the papers to come out of the Digital Epiphanies project, “Estimating Usage Can Reduce the Stress of Social Networking” was presented in the Personal Informatics Workshop at CHI’13. This study looked at the impact of estimating social networking use over the period on perceived stress and time management behaviours in a student sample. Although actual behaviour did not change, participants improved in the accuracy of their estimations and also reported a significant decrease in perceived stress. Therefore, having a more accurate idea of how much social networking you use may prevent you from feeling stressed or concerned about it.

The full paper can be found here .

Welcome

Welcome to the Digital Epiphanies blog. Here we will post updates, explorations and musings on the themes of our research project, which looks at the interrelation between digital technology and work life balance. The types of questions we will be addressing in coming months include:

• What actually is work life balance, is it a helpful term?
• What digital tools are people already using to help with their work life balance?
• How is digital technology re-shaping the ways we live and work?
• Are there ways in which technology can help us achieve better work life balance (and what do we really mean by ‘better’ anyway?!)

That’s all for now! Rosie & the DE team