Conflict in Families as an Ethical and Methodological Consideration

Families are composed of a collection of individuals, each with his or her own motivations, preferences, and goals. I conducted a series of mixed-methods investigations of parent-child communication-a context where these conflicts are frequently brought to the forefront. I describe my semi-structured interview studies with children and parents, as well as an investigation of a field deployment of a communication system evaluated using interviews, questionnaires, and video logging. I share my insight on conflict in the home and its potential role in shaping how we design for and study families. My lessons from this series of investigations are framed as recommendations for methodological approaches: articulating a stance as a designer, obtaining consent, deciding how to interview participants, measuring negative effects of interventions, and selecting the unit of analysis.