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When home base is not a place: parents’ use of mobile telephones

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Abstract

More attention is being paid to the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are sensitive to the needs of people in their homes. By studying mobile telephony in such settings, we contribute to this discussion by examining how behaviors and characteristics of family life shape and in turn are shaped by ICTs. We present the results of a study of the primary caregivers in five families who were studied over the course of a week. We found that parents only relaxed their attachment to their mobile phones when in the presence of their children. Parents and other families perceived their phones as a means of staying connected or tethered across different kinds of situations. Ages of children and their involvement with other institutions beyond the family affected how parents oriented to their mobile phones, matching their parental shift work to those institutional schedules. Transition times between children’s activities were important moments for mobile phone use between child and parent as well as parent and others because those transitions also marked a change in parents’ work. Ultimately, the mobile phone facilitated the extension of a wider reach of “home” beyond the physical house, meaning that the parent—enhanced by the direct line of the mobile phone—was the embodiment of “home base.”

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Notes

  1. Some things can be gendered as female or male and still be used, performed, or created by either sex.

  2. A word about SMS or “texting” for our non-American readers: We have only studied voice call activity in this study. Texting has not reached the level of popularity it enjoys in other parts of the world. In a recent study of US SMS use in Spring 2005, for example, less than 5% of adults over age 35 used SMS on a daily basis [40]. With the exception of John and his wife Joannie, a technologically savvy family who themselves had only been using SMS for 7 months (commencing at the beginning of 2005), no other adults in this study use SMS. All mobile phone activity reported here pertains to voice–call interactions.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Center for Interactive Spaces under ISIS Katrinebjerg, Aarhus, Denmark. Jenifer Martin participated in an early phase of this research. We thank Rich Ling and Susanne Bødker for assistance, as well as reviewers of an early draft of the paper. We thank our study participants for their time and attention to this project during already busy days.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

    Leysia Palen

  2. University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

    Amanda Hughes

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  1. Leysia Palen
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  2. Amanda Hughes
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Correspondence to Leysia Palen.

Additional information

Leysia Palen prepared this manuscript while on sabbatical from the University of Colorado, Boulder at the University of Aarhus (Denmark)’s Center for Interactive Spaces. Amanda Hughes is a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Colorado

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Palen, L., Hughes, A. When home base is not a place: parents’ use of mobile telephones. Pers Ubiquit Comput 11, 339–348 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-006-0078-3

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