Hi everyone my name is Ryan Kelly and I'm a researcher at the University of Melbourne.
Today I'm going to be talking about some research on the ways that students use digital technologies
to alleviate homesickness. Homesickness refers to the distress that people experience when
they feel separated from their home. Research shows that 94 per cent of students experience
homesickness at least once and that can be a very distracting feeling. Those who feel
strongly homesick can experience depressed mood, impaired concentration and are much more likely to
drop out of university. Homesickness has also become relevant due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
which has left many students unable to return home on a regular basis. This means that much
of the contact students have with their home is through things like video chat and social media.
However, the role of these tools in dealing with homesickness is not well understood.
In this study, we wanted to understand students' existing practices around the use of technology,
so that we could identify opportunities for new designs for people who are homesick.
With this aim in mind, the main question we wanted to answer was: How do students use
digital technologies to alleviate homesickness? To explore this question, we recruited fifty students
who were living in Melbourne, Australia. The students were from a range of cultures and
all of them had moved away from home to attend university. In the study, each person completed
a questionnaire and an in-depth interview, held over Zoom. Twelve of the participants
also completed a diary for four weeks, which involved writing about daily uses of technology
and how this helped deal with homesickness. Now as a qualitative study there's a lot of
detail in the findings, so here I'm just going to focus on two of the main ideas from this paper.
The first thing we found was that technologies are used to connect with a lot more than just people.
It's worth noting that the students did talk extensively about connecting with friends,
family and even their pets through things like video chat and instant messaging.
These technologies were helpful because they allowed students to acquire social contact and
find support from others in times of distress. But technologies were used to feel connected
with many other things from home as well. As an example, the students frequently talked about
connecting with food and culture when they felt homesick. Many described craving the food from
their homeland and missed the experience of eating with others. To replicate this feeling,
the participants used platforms like YouTube to watch others eating the same food. This
somehow helped to satisfy their cravings. Other participants discussed the importance of music and
valued the way that platforms like Spotify give on-demand access to rare songs from their home.
Listening to music helped people to feel a sense of homeliness and reminded them of where they had
come from. There were also cases where music and videos were used for emotion regulation,
which involves using technology to change how one is feeling. Another way technologies were used was
for a connection with places. Again, this stresses that missing home is not just about people.
One participant talked about using a live streamed video to virtually visit her home town in North
Macedonia. This gave her a sense of presence and a feeling of actually being there at the remote
site. Ideas around presence also emerged during discussions of social technologies like online
games, which were mentioned as particularly helpful for alleviating homesickness.
Some examples mentioned in this study included League of Legends and Animal Crossing.
In these cases, it wasn't just the experience of playing the game that made people feel better,
but rather the sense of being together with others in virtual space.
The participants said this created the same kind of vibe they experienced at home.
It gave a sense of being connected to others, even though they were physically separated.
The second main finding of this study was that technologies sometimes made homesickness
worse. The students discussed problems such as heightened emotional labor, frequent exposure
to homesickness triggers, and the feeling that technologies sometimes increase the sense of
distance from home. Based on these experiences, the students shared various ideas for new designs.
One example was for a system that could create stronger co-presence with people and places.
The participants used words like "holograms" or "teleporting" to describe what this would be like,
hinting at the possible use of virtual reality to connect with home.
They also wondered whether technology could allow them to experience food and culture,
such as through stimulation of taste, touch, and smell. These ideas suggest that research
on the production of digital flavors could be usefully applied to the problem of homesickness.
Overall, this research suggests that students use a wide range of technologies to deal with
homesickness, and that some of these may help to bridge the sense of psychological distance
from home. A challenge for HCI researchers lies in designing technologies that provide
a meaningful experience of connection without increasing the sense of being away.
That's all from me, thanks very much for your attention.