From Barriers to Blueprints: A Critical Systematic Review of Older Adults and Social VR

Paper Title

From Barriers to Blueprints: A Critical Systematic Review of Older Adults and Social VR

Publication Info

• Topic area: Older adults' interaction with social virtual reality (VR) and the epistemological framing of their resistance.
• Keywords: Older adults, social VR, epistemic injustice, resistant reading, HCI, deficit paradigm, design intelligence, accessibility, embodiment, participatory design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: The dominant framing in HCI research interprets older adults' resistance to social VR as adoption failure, perpetuating a "deficit paradigm" that misrepresents their needs and excludes their perspectives from shaping technology.
• Significance: This framing leads to the design of VR systems that fail to meet the comfort, agency, and connection needs of older adults, reinforcing their exclusion from emerging digital spaces like the Metaverse.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has critiqued the biomedicalization of aging and the deficit-focused discourse in technology design for older adults. However, these critiques remain marginal, and the field lacks frameworks to recognize resistance as valid testimony. This paper builds on socio-gerontechnology and epistemic injustice frameworks to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The authors propose "resistant reading," a method adapted from feminist literary theory, to reinterpret documented instances of resistance in VR research as design intelligence rather than user deficits.
• Novelty:
  1. Resistant reading as a systematic method to recover silenced user testimony from existing research.
  2. Empirical evidence of institutional epistemic injustice in HCI, showing how deficit paradigms devalue older adults' testimony.
  3. Four Critical Re-Orientations to reframe user friction as testimony about systemic inadequacy.
  4. A methodological framework for applying resistant reading to other contexts of epistemic injustice in HCI.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a systematic review of 85 papers (2017–2024) on older adults and social VR.
  • Applied resistant reading to extract and reinterpret 284 instances of user resistance across four dimensions: Activity, Embodiment, Environment, and Accessibility.
  • Quantified patterns of misinterpretation and proposed epistemological pivots to address systemic inadequacies.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified 284 instances of user resistance, with 74.3% spanning multiple dimensions.
  • Documented a ratio of VoicedCritique (124 instances) to ResearcherMisinterpretation (66 instances), highlighting systemic epistemic injustice.
  • Found that 55.3% of reviewed studies adopted a techno-solutionist framing, while only 18.8% emphasized empowerment.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Reframes user resistance as actionable design intelligence, challenging the deficit-focused inquiry that dominates current research.
  • Provides a structured methodology to identify and address epistemic injustice in HCI.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Systematic review and meta-analysis of 85 papers using a multi-pass coding protocol.
  • Resistance instances analyzed across four dimensions: Activity (102 instances), Accessibility (69), Embodiment (66), and Environment (47).
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited to English-language, peer-reviewed publications, potentially excluding diverse perspectives.
  • Focused on resistance, potentially underrepresenting positive experiences with social VR.
  • Calls for co-design workshops and prototype systems embodying the proposed Critical Re-Orientations.

Summary

This paper critiques the deficit paradigm in HCI research on older adults and social VR, demonstrating how user resistance has been misinterpreted as adoption failure. Through a systematic review of 85 papers, the authors identify 284 instances of resistance as design intelligence, revealing systemic epistemic injustice in the field. They propose resistant reading as a method to recover silenced testimony and introduce four Critical Re-Orientations to guide more inclusive research and design practices. These findings challenge the CHI community to recognize older adults as co-architects of sociotechnical systems and to build platforms that genuinely listen to their needs.