Dsane, Sarah (2025) Understanding Parents’ Information Behaviour During the First 1000 Days to Inform Technology Design, PhD.
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The first 1000 days, from conception to a child’s second birthday, represent a critical developmental window with lasting effects on health and well-being. As parents navigate this period, many turn to digital tools for health information, drawn by their accessibility and convenience. This thesis adopts a qualitative, participatory approach across three case studies in Cape Town, South Africa, and Techiman, Ghana, to examine how parents seek, share, and make sense of information during the first 1000 days. The first study, drawing on interviews with 53 participants, finds that while digital sources like Google and YouTube are widely used, trust in these tools is uneven shaped by intersecting factors such as gender norms, digital literacy, and past experiences with healthcare. Many parents relied on a mix of digital and interpersonal sources, triangulating advice through a complex social lens. The second study analyzes WhatsApp group chats from antenatal and postnatal classes to uncover how parents share information in everyday digital interactions. Findings show that WhatsApp groups act as informal learning spaces that enable emotional support, community building, and peer-driven knowledge especially in groups that combine online and in-person interactions. However, virtual-only groups tended to foster less intimacy and reduced collective meaning-making. The third study engages 10 families in co-designing a parenting app prototype, surfacing a strong preference for digital tools that balance medical credibility with the lived realities of caregiving. These sessions revealed how design processes can bring visibility to often-overlooked caregiving practices, particularly fathers and other support ecologies. Together, these studies call for digital interventions that are personalized and socially embedded grounded in lived experience while bridging gaps in formal care systems. This work contributes to HCI by offering empirical insights into how digital tools are appropriated during early parenting in low-resource settings, and by demonstrating how participatory design can support the development of culturally resonant, trust-centered digital health solutions.
| Item Type: | Electronic thesis or dissertation (PhD) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Hasso Plattner Institute Research School at the University of Cape Town |
| Subjects: | Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Mar 2026 07:32 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Mar 2026 07:32 |
| URI: | https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1779 |
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