Afterword

As digital technologies – used socially for information, communication or entertainment – allow for new ways of living social life and of knowing about it, it is increasingly significant that we inquire about the crucial matter of what the digital does to the ways we know about each other, how we live, and what social scientists can learn from and with the digital....

Rescue chains and care talk among immigrants and their left-behind parents

This chapter examines the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by Mexican immigrant families living in the United States to care for their aged left-behind parents and grandparents suffering from poor health. It introduces the concepts of ‘rescue chain’ and ‘care talk’ to account for the interplay between ICTs and transnational families. Drawing on the stories of ten participants, the chapter considers how Mexican immigrants and their siblings, locally and abroad, form rescue chains to deliver care to ageing left-behind parents with health problems through ICTs. It shows that the rescue chain communication involves care talk that focused on protecting, providing, and proving that the care needs of the person in crisis were addressed. The chapter also reviews the literature on ageing and long-distance caring through ICTs, discusses theories on care and ageing, and explains the methodology and sources used in the study.

Floating narratives: transnational families and digital storytelling

This chapter examines the effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on storytelling as a practice of communication among transnational families. It describes three technological affordances that are linked to digital storytelling practices of six Colombian migrant families residing in Montreal, Canada: presence, interactivity, and multimodality. After providing an overview of the methodological approach employed in the research study and the techniques used to collect and analyse the data, the chapter discusses the findings with regard to the views of the participant families about the dynamics of their post-migration storytelling experiences. More specifically, it considers the Colombian families' perspectives about being present during their digital interactions. An important finding is that digital mediation seems to be altering family storytelling. For some families, ICTs catalyse storytelling in situations where presence and multimodality take place; for others, ICTs constrain family storytelling when the illusion of nonmediation is not experienced.

Recursive approaches to technology adoption, families, and the life course: actor network theory and strong structuration theory

This chapter examines two recursive approaches to the study of technology adoption within families and the life course: actor network theory (ANT) and strong structuration theory (SST). These recursive approaches explain the reciprocal relationship between social structure and agency in the context of technology use over time. ANT rejects any dualism between technology and society, whereas SST combines structure, agency, and context to offer a comprehensive analysis of users, technologies, and their situational dimensions. The chapter first provides an overview of the theoretical commitments ANT and SST entail for the researcher before discussing the ways in which each has been, and can be, applied in the domains of family and life course studies. It also presents two case studies to illustrate the opportunities and challenges that both recursive approaches bring with them in framing and explaining relationships between technology use, family life, and life transitions.

‘Wherever you go, wherever you are, I am with you … connected with my mobile’: the use of mobile text messages for the maintenance of family and romantic relations

This chapter examines how smartphones may function as a relevant digital tool for maintaining both family and romantic relationships. Using data from a quantitative diary study and follow-up qualitative interviews with twenty-four smartphone users aged 20–30 years as a part of a research teaching course at a German university in June 2015, the chapter considers the different reasons for using text messages. It first provides an overview of relationship maintenance in the age of mobile communication before discussing the research methodology and the findings. The results show that smartphones are used as everyday companions by the majority of respondents and allow perpetual contact with loved ones, independent of time or space. The study also revealed the content of the text messages and the perception that smartphones and texting pose a threat to relationships. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the study.

Connecting families? An introduction

This book examines how information and communication technologies (ICTs) relate to family life (including intergenerational relationships, routines, norms, work, intimacy, and privacy). Drawing on theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches, it explores how ICTs are used and integrated in family dynamics and what opportunities and challenges arise from that use in a life course perspective. The book features contributions from researchers who attended conferences of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the last of which was held in 2016 in Vienna, Austria. Topics include technology adoption within family and the life course; the use of communication technologies such as emailing and texting for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity; the impact of ICTs on storytelling processes among transnational families; and how ICTs affect the permeability of work–family borders. This chapter explains the concepts of family, generations, ICTs, and the life course before concluding with an overview of the organisation of the book.

Careful families and care as ‘kinwork’: an intergenerational study of families and digital media use in Melbourne, Australia

This chapter examines how digital media practices, relating to care and intimacy (the ‘intimate surveillance’), are being played out in the daily lives of intergenerational and cross-cultural families in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Melbourne with thirteen households in 2015–2016, it considers how ‘doing family’ practices — the ways that family members maintain co-presence through routines and everyday tasks — are interwoven with intergenerational and cross-cultural relationships, revealing textures of intimacy and boundary work that intersect with the mundane to create new types of social surveillance and disappearance. The chapter also introduces the framework of ‘digital kinship’, which provides a life course perspective to take into account the differing roles, positions, meanings and contexts over a person's lifespan, and concludes with a discussion of how friendly surveillance, staying in touch and caring at a distance are made possible through social media platforms.

Use of communication technology to maintain intergenerational contact: toward an understanding of ‘digital solidarity’

This chapter examines the use of communication technology (emailing and texting) for the maintenance of digital solidarity. It first considers the role of digital solidarity in the study of intergenerational solidarity, and more specifically how digital solidarity adds a new dimension to the concepts of associational solidarity and functional solidarity. It then explores the use of emailing and texting by older mothers to maintain contact with their adult children using data from two US sources and from different years (the 2008 Within-Family Differences Study and the 2016 Longitudinal Study of Generations). The demographic characteristics of mothers are discussed, along with the characteristics of their adult children and the methods used in the two studies. The results show that mothers in the 2016 sample are more likely to use communication technology with their offspring than are mothers in the 2008 sample. The chapter concludes by suggesting directions for future research.

From object to instrument: technologies as tools for family relations and family research

This chapter explores the use of technologies as objects and tools in family research. It first considers four main sociological objects that are involved in the interplay between family life and information and communication technologies (ICTs): intimate couple life, intergenerational relationships, transnational or migrant families, and the life course. It then discusses the positive and negative social effects of ICT usage in family life before describing a project based on the life course approach, with a family-centred methodology as the privileged unit of analysis, that utilised CAQDAS (computer assisted qualitative data analysis software) to investigate the processes of social mobility in Portugal over recent decades. The chapter shows that technologies can be envisaged both as an object of study (technology usage and its impact on family relationships in a life course perspective) and as an instrument (technology as a tool).

The application of digital methods in a life course approach to family studies

This chapter considers how the emerging field of digital research methods can be applied in a life course approach to family studies. It first describes the methodological dimensions of the life course approach to family studies before discussing what analytical elements of this approach may be aligned with digital methods. It then provides examples of digital methods present in family studies and goes on to examine digital thinking that leads to the development of three tropes through which to order and align digital approaches: networks, big data and ubiquity. It also explains how digital research methods may be used to identify data sources (such as the use of digital traces of online activity within social media), within data collection techniques (such as web scraping techniques) and through data analysis approaches, including data visualisation. The chapter concludes by highlighting the limitations and ethical issues of employing these methods.