Understanding How Parents Deal With the Health Advice They Receive: A Qualitative Study and Implications for the Design of Message-based Health Dissemination Systems for Child Health

Félix, Beatriz and Braga, Cristiana and Ntinga, Xolani and Till, Sarina and Meoli, Leona and Van Heerden, Alastair and Melo, Ricardo and Verdezoto, Nervo and Densmore, Melissa and Nunes, Francisco (2024) Understanding How Parents Deal With the Health Advice They Receive: A Qualitative Study and Implications for the Design of Message-based Health Dissemination Systems for Child Health, Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems, 1-5 July 2024, Copenhagen, Denmark, DIS '24, 1319-1335, Association for Computing Machinery.

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Abstract

Message-based health information dissemination systems can potentially improve maternal and child health (MCH). By conveying health information to parents, SMS- and chatbot-based systems can support parents’ learning and empower them to make better health decisions for their children. However, there is limited design advice for creating message-based dissemination systems for MCH. To help address this gap, we conducted 14 participatory workshops with 42 parents from Portugal and South Africa, exploring how parents learned to care for their children’s health. Our findings showed how parents reflected on the health advice they received, by assessing the fit of the advice to their child’s characteristics, their values and beliefs, the advice’s feasibility, or the intention and competence of the advice giver. Based on these insights, we propose four design implications for creating message-based health information dissemination systems tailored to parents and their children.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Chatbot, Child health, Child health care practices, Health Advice, Message-based health information dissemination, Parenting, Qualitative Research, SMS
Subjects:	Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) Applied computing > Life and medical sciences > Health informatics Human-centered computing > Interaction design > Interaction design process and methods > Participatory design Human-centered computing > Collaborative and social computing > Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms > Social media
Alternate Locations:	https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3643834.3661504
Date Deposited:	17 Oct 2025 06:31
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2025 06:31
URI:	https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1771

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