Summary

During the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing apps on smartphones that can quickly notify an individual that they have been near someone with a positive COVID-19 result were touted as a key solution to allow economies to re-open. For contact tracing to work, a significant portion of the community must use the apps, which requires sharing of some information. This research sought to understand how families navigated use of contact tracing apps and sharing of information since individual decisions can affect the entire household, and potentially create tensions in the family. The research used qualitative and quantitative surveys of parents and teens at two timepoints (October 2020; February 2021) in different regions with both mandatory and optional use of contact tracing. By understanding barriers to contact tracing acceptance in families, we can help design future community health technology tools and programs.

Intellectual Merit

The research team involved faculty from human development and family science and information systems, and researchers from psychology and statistics. Team members learned from each other and integrated their respective disciplinary knowledge into transdisciplinary work in ways that would not have been possible without this project.  For example, the concept of “privacy” is used in many fields but not consistently. In family science, the family, as a social institution, has been assumed to occupy only the private realm, where what goes on in families is not well known. Thus, privacy reflects the “private” emotional and physical bonds of family members “behind closed doors.” Bringing a critical, intersectional perspective to the established notion that a family’s emotional environment is private, it is now clear that what happens in families is shaped by, and also shapes, the public realm. In information systems, privacy is mostly studied as an individual concept where individual perceptions affect decisions to share information or not. Yet, our research shows that family members embedded in their social unit (i.e., their family) make privacy decisions that affect each other, with implications for society at large. This substantially enhances our understanding of multilevel privacy.

To the information systems discipline we brought the concepts of family tensions to better understand technological decisions in families. We also considered the ecological perspective on families, where the individual, family, community, and society are nested systems that interrelate and mutually influence one another. This helped understand how family tensions affected contact tracing attitudes and behaviors, and consider how decisions were linked to how family members differ by age, gender, generation, social class, and the like. To the family science discipline, we brought the concepts of information privacy, technology adoption, the calculus of behavior, and multilevel theorizing, allowing us to better understand the introduction of new technologies in family units. For example, we identified significant effects of social class and gender on the understanding and attitudes towards contact tracing by comparing gender of parent/teen dyads.

Broader Impacts

This research has significant impacts for the future of technologies that can be used to handle health or other global or community crises, especially the concept of community technologies. This concept is important to avoid issues that contact tracing programs faced (i.e., lack of adoption) and at the same time inform how to not only develop but also disseminate future such technologies. We believe it is possible to build upon the strengths of parent-child and other family relationships to increase facilitation and acceptance of community technologies to thwart future global health crises. This is of interest to public administration and the medical field. For example, our work was cited in several medical news media when initially started. Finally, a major impact for society is our findings surrounding digital divide and digital inclusion issues. It is clear from our findings that there are some social class divisions surrounding the understanding of contact tracing (and information privacy), as well as gender and generational differences in attitudes and behaviors towards contact tracing. This again speaks to the future release of other community technologies. Furthermore, we found that people who viewed the benefits of using contact tracing apps as outweighing their privacy concerns were more apt to use the contact tracing apps, consistent with the privacy calculus. Not only that, but these people were also more likely to follow COVID-19 health recommendations. Interestingly, a person’s political leanings did not have a significant influence on whether they followed these recommendations. This finding adds to the discourse on what is necessary to encourage people to engage in positive health behaviors in the midst of a pandemic.

Last Modified: 09/05/2022
Modified by: France Belanger