How ICTs Can Ease Difficult Life Transitions

Jeff Hemsley

Bryan Semaan

Jennifer StromerGalley

How do people use information and communication technologies? How does peoples’ use of diverse technologies affect society? Those are the fundamental questions that iSchool researchers in the Behavior, Information, Technology and Society Laboratory (BITS) examine.

Researchers conduct studies in the arenas of social media, social computing, social networks, text and data mining, natural language processing and information retrieval. They investigate issues of communication, human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Their efforts take them into examinations of cultural issues in computing, crisis informatics (disruption), resilience and normalcy, serious games, social movements, information diffusion, civic engagement, e-particpation and digital politics.

Their investigations result in the development of cutting-edge applications, tools and software to manage the issues people and society have regarding technologies, as well as the creation of impactful design, mobile and social media applications and online learning platforms.

Recognizing that varied approaches can highlight different phenomena and inform understandings in different ways, BITS faculty, staff and students use a variety of methods in their work. These include ethnography, human and machine-driven content analysis, experiments, social networks analysis and data visualization.

Lab directors: Jeff Hemsley, assistant professor; Bryan Semaan, assistant professor; and Jennifer Stromer-Galley, professor.

Study: How ICTs Create Resiliency During Life Transitions M embers of populations that can become marginalized in society—from military personnel newly home from deployment, to women becoming new mothers, to people changing genders, to immigrants adjusting to all-new communities— face a number of crises managing and navigating the disruptions those life transitions trigger. Increasingly, information communication technologies are providing online support systems when society’s established systems and agencies fail to meet those personal and community needs.

Assistant Professor Bryan Semaan is digging deeper into that equation to determine precisely how information communication technologies (ICTs) can fill the gap and improve peoples’ resilience to life disruptions. His study is one of the research projects underway in the BITS (Behavior, Information, Technology and Society) Lab. The work is being funded by a National Science Foundation grant of $173,205 to support research through 2019.

Semaan’s goal is to provide a more empirically-situated understanding of how life transitions happen and how ICTs are used to navigate them. He believes that knowledge will provide a useful basis for improving the designs of technologies, advancing training and education for life transitions and influencing social and governmental policy.

In the NSF-funded study, Semaan is looking at how military service members manage changing from a hierarchical, highlystructured, active-duty lifestyle to a typically unstructured civilian life. For many veterans, that transition can involve severe mental, physical, emotional and sometimes-invisible crises, he says.

However, from online community spaces built around camaraderie to the development of new social media and mobile applications, ICTs are helping those in transition cope with the changes around

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