Browsing by Author "Young, Alyson L."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Daughters of Men: Saudi Women's Sociotechnical Agency Practices in Addressing Domestic Abuse
    (Association of Computing Engineering, 2020-12) Rabaan, Hawra; Young, Alyson L.; Dombrowski, Lynn; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    While domestic abuse is an all too common experience for women worldwide, how people experience the abuse and their resources to deal with the abuse differ. In this qualitative, interview-based study, we examine Saudi women's domestic safety concerns living in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Based on non-Western Islamic feminist views of agency, we identify three key practices, focused on how women resist or deal with their domestic violence. For each practice, we highlight how interwoven cultural, religious, and political contexts impact Saudi women's ability to recognize and deal with domestic abuse. We attend to technology's role in enabling or hindering women's agency. These practices include: 1) recognizing abuse, where women identify abusive situations, 2) managing abuse, where women find ways to cope with ongoing or anticipated abuse within their constraints and resources, and 3) seeking non-abusive futures, where women decide how to mitigate the abuse or leave their abuser. Given domestic violence's complicated nature, we highlight several key design recommendations based on women's values.
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    Studying the Impression of Saudi People towards Current Social Changes
    (ACM, 2018-11) Rabaan, Hawra; Chkraborty, Sunandan; Young, Alyson L.; BioHealth Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing
    In this work-in-progress paper, we examine how the campaign to end the guardianship law in Saudi Arabia is being discussed and debated on social media. Through a content analysis of tweets, we first identify those with either a positive or negative sentiment towards ending the law and then we identify topical themes across these sentiment categories. We found polarizing responses with individuals either calling for the end of the law or those opposing its end on religious or moral grounds. This analysis provides a basis for building a model to automatically code tweets to increase the accuracy of Arabic text prediction. This will allow us to answer new questions about the dataset and inform the design of ICTs
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    Telegram as An Immigration Management Tool
    (ACM, 2018-11) Nikkah, Sarah; Miller, Andrew D.; Young, Alyson L.; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    This paper describes an ongoing study that examines Iranian immigrants' use of communication tools and online communities throughout the immigration process. We conducted observations on 30 Iranian immigration-related groups on the Telegram messaging application to understand its impacts on immigrants' collaboration, information-seeking, and information-sharing behavior. This research has implications to support immigration practices through technology.
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    "This Girl is on Fire": Sensemaking in an Online Health Community for Vulvodynia
    (ACM, 2019-05) Young, Alyson L.; Miller, Andrew D.; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
    Online health communities (OHCs) allow people living with a shared diagnosis or medical condition to connect with peers for social support and advice. OHCs have been well studied in conditions like diabetes and cancer, but less is known about their role in enigmatic diseases with unknown or complex causal mechanisms. In this paper, we study one such condition: Vulvodynia, a chronic pain syndrome of the vulvar region. Through observations of and interviews with members of a vulvodynia Facebook group, we found that while the interaction types are broadly similar to those found in other OHCs, the women spent more time seeking basic information and building individualized management plans. They also encounter significant emotional and interpersonal challenges, which they discuss with each other. We use this study to extend the field's understanding of OHCs, and to propose implications for the design of self-tracking tools to support sensemaking in enigmatic conditions.