Probes to Explore the Individual Perspectives on Technology Use that exist within Sets of Parents

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Research reveals that family experiences of technology use in everyday life can be complex and messy, often associated with tension and conflict. This complexity can be intensified when sets of parents have differing individual perspectives on their family’s technology use. Exploring these different perspectives, requires an approach that not only considers parents not only as individuals, but also as part of a set. To challenge matters further, parents may not be fully aware of their own attitudes and assumptions relating to technology, let alone of each other’s. Parents may also be embarrassed to share details about family conflicts. This methods paper presents a probe study that successfully helped us to explore the individual perspectives on family technology use that exist within sets of parents. It provides an example of an approach to using probes that can reveal the hidden experiences of multiple individuals within a social context. In this way, it contributes an understanding of how we might interrogate the complexities of co-experience.