Designing communication technologies for socially isolated older people: fieldwork reflections

In this paper we reflect on the challenges we encountered when conducting research with socially isolated older people. We examine how our participants’ vulnerability affected our conceptualization of social isolation and altered our approach to investigating it. The vulnerability of our participants and complexities of social isolation created fieldwork challenges, raising methodological and ethical issues for us to consider in our future work. Our field study informs the ongoing development and evaluation of a socio-technical system that aims to help ameliorate older people’s experience of social isolation.