Unaccompanied Migrant Youth and Mental Health Technologies: A social-Ecological Approach to Understanding and Designing

Tachtler, Franziska, Talhouk, Reem, Michel, Toni, Slovák, Petr and Fitzpatrick, Geraldine (2021) Unaccompanied Migrant Youth and Mental Health Technologies: A social-Ecological Approach to Understanding and Designing. In: CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, p. 541. ISBN 9781450380966

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Abstract

Research increasingly shows that technology can improve access to mental health interventions. However, unaccompanied migrant youth (UMY) still struggle in accessing appropriate mental health resources in spite of their high need for mental health support. Through co-design workshops, and using the lens of the socialecological model of resilience, we explored the social-ecological factors that support or hinder UMY’s use of mental health apps as resources. We identified the strong influence of the macro-system (i.e. resettlement policies) on the bio-and micro-systems, which in turn limits participants’ abilities to use the apps. Our findings highlight the factors specific to each social-ecological system—including personal experiences, technological infrastructure and social environment—that need to be accounted for when designing technological mental health resources for UMY. This contributes: a rich description of the interplay of mental health apps with socialecological systems in which UMY are embedded; and the corresponding design considerations.

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