Understanding Emotional Closeness in Distanced Intergenerational Relationships Between Young Children and Older Adults: A Scoping Review for HCI

Paper Title

Understanding Emotional Closeness in Distanced Intergenerational Relationships Between Young Children and Older Relatives: A Scoping Review for HCI

Publication Info

• Topic area: Emotional closeness in intergenerational relationships mediated by technology.
• Keywords: Emotional closeness, intergenerational relationships, human-computer interaction, remote communication, family connection, bonding, cultural belonging, embodied presence, relational practices, affective expression.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Emotional closeness (EC) is often treated as self-evident in HCI research, relying on adjacent constructs like connection or co-presence. This limits understanding of EC in remote intergenerational relationships involving young children and older relatives, where developmental asymmetries and cultural roles complicate its definition, evaluation, and technological mediation.
• Significance: EC is critical for sustaining meaningful family relationships, supporting socio-emotional development in children, and providing older adults with purpose and continuity. Addressing the challenges of EC in distanced contexts is increasingly relevant due to global mobility and reliance on digital communication.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research in HCI has explored technologies for connection but often assumes interaction frequency equates to closeness. Adjacent fields like psychology and family studies provide richer theoretical insights but lack focus on technology-mediated EC in young child-older adult relationships. This paper addresses these gaps by synthesizing definitions, evaluation methods, and design implications for EC.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A scoping review of 30 papers (2010–2025) to clarify how EC is defined, evaluated, and mediated in geographically separated intergenerational relationships between young children (4–8 years) and older relatives.
• Novelty:
  1. Synthesizes a multidimensional definition of EC comprising Affective Expression, Relational Practices, Embodied Presence, and Cultural Belonging.
  2. Critically analyzes evaluation practices, highlighting reliance on interaction metrics and proposing methodological considerations.
  3. Provides design implications for technologies that support meaningful, culturally grounded intergenerational connection.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a systematic search across four databases (ACM DL, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO) using tailored search strings.
  • Screened 998 records, resulting in 30 included studies based on predefined inclusion/exclusion criteria.
  • Thematically analyzed definitions, evaluation methods, and technological mechanisms using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • EC is rarely explicitly defined in HCI; instead, it is inferred through constructs like bonding, connection, and co-presence.
  • Evaluation methods predominantly rely on self-report (77%) and behavioral observation (70%), with limited use of system-generated metrics (10%).
  • Technologies mediating EC often focus on video communication (57%) and shared activities (40%), with less emphasis on affective expression (23%) or cultural belonging (13%).
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Provides a multidimensional definition of EC, addressing gaps in prior work that conflated EC with interaction metrics or adjacent constructs.
  • Highlights methodological shortcomings in HCI, advocating for triangulated approaches that capture EC's diverse qualities beyond interaction frequency.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Reviewed studies employed qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, observations) and limited quantitative approaches (e.g., surveys, system logs).
  • Technologies included video calls, storytelling platforms, tangible systems, and ambient media, evaluated for their ability to foster connection and shared activities.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited scope to young child-older adult relationships; findings may not generalize to other family configurations.
  • Lack of critical assessment of methodological rigor in included studies.
  • Future research should explore multimodal and longitudinal methods, integrate perspectives from related disciplines, and address cultural diversity in EC design.

Summary

This scoping review addresses the fragmented understanding of emotional closeness (EC) in geographically separated intergenerational relationships between young children and older relatives. Synthesizing insights from 30 studies, it defines EC as a multidimensional relational process comprising Affective Expression, Relational Practices, Embodied Presence, and Cultural Belonging. The review critiques reliance on interaction metrics and highlights the need for triangulated methods to capture EC's diverse qualities. Design implications include supporting asynchronous practices, shared activities, and cultural continuity. These contributions provide conceptual clarity and practical guidance for HCI researchers to enable meaningful, sustained, and culturally situated intergenerational connection across distance.