CRII: CHS: Transition Resilience: Navigating Invisible Crises with ICTs

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This research focuses on how veterans returning home from war use information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as social and mobile media, to manage invisible crises in transition - those unexpected or unusual dislocations that challenge our ordinary means for solving problems. These technologies can improve peoples' resilience to disruptions, but at present there is a lack of deep and systematic knowledge about how ICTs enable resiliency, and this research aims to address this gap. A more empirically situated understanding of how transitions happen and how ICTs are used can provide the basis for improving the designs of technologies, advancing training and education for transition, and influencing policy. The broader impacts of the proposed work include: (1) Developing guidelines in support of training, education and policies to support veterans' transitions to their non-war life, which can also be applied to other groups undergoing transitions; and (2) Contributing to the development of new ICT-enabled tools to help people detect, make sense of and navigate an array of invisible crises. The case of US veterans will yield valuable insights in understanding ICT-enabled resilience, as their transition is long-term, their experience often involves several crises at once, and institutional support to help them regain normalcy post-service is often poor. The following questions will guide the inquiry: How can ICTs help people manage and adapt to their new situations? How do people decide which ICT resources to use? How do people transact support, both social and informational, through different ICTs? How are online support spaces sustained? What requirements and designs for new ICTs could be identified to support transition resilience? In pursuit of answers, the research combines several periods of intense data collection that rely on semi-structured interviews and observations of online data, such as what is communicated through social media. A participatory design and diary study effort will inform the initial development and evaluation of a new ICT that empowers veterans via the ability to detect, make sense of and navigate invisible crises.