This book provides a comprehensive review of how digital communication technology can help families network and communicate across generations, despite differences in family composition, residential location, cultural values and orientations. Covering the full spectrum of intergenerational relations (including child to parent, and parent to grandparent), it offers a positive view of the value of digital technology usage within families. The author focuses on three European countries: Finland, Italy and Slovenia, but also touches on other European countries and parts of the United States, revealing evidence that challenges ideas of universal adoption of information communication technology (ICT) and consistency in the social effects of such adoption in different regions and cultures. Further, the book discusses numerous other challenges and issues, such as: • the social transformations and technological developments that have made digital families possible; • the resulting changes in family roles, responsibilities, and practices; and • the theoretical and conceptual implications of digital communication-technology use in families. The author illustrates how ICT can facilitate family solidarity and how it helps to provide new ways of being together, and they discuss how social media, particularly instant messaging applications, helps develop affinity between family members better than traditional one-to-one personal communication tools. Combining highly nuanced material with fresh sociological thinking, it enhances readers’ theoretical understanding of the meaning of the ‘digital family’, making it a powerful resource for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as academics. Thanks to its structured format with easy-to-understand explanations, it appeals to practitioners and researchers alike.

Are Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) connecting families? And what does this mean in terms of family routines, relationships, norms, work, intimacy and privacy? This edited collection takes a life course and generational perspective covering theory, including posthumanism and strong structuration theory, and methodology, including digital and cross-disciplinary methods. It presents a series of case studies on topics such as intergenerational connections, work-life balance, transnational families, digital storytelling and mobile parenting. It will give students, researchers and practitioners a variety of tools to make sense of how ICTs are used, appropriated and domesticated in family life. These tools allow for an informed and critical understanding of ICTs and family dynamics.

The Routledge International Handbook of Couple and Family Therapy is a comprehensive text that promotes innovative frameworks and interventions in couple and family therapy from a cross cultural perspective. A diverse range of international contributors explore the role that demography, regionality, cultural and political crises, and policy, have on the issues faced by couples and families. Collectively, the chapters articulate unique ideas in conceptualizing the needs of families with international backgrounds, adapting the current models and frameworks to work with this population most effectively. The text is split into four sections covering: personal voices and philosophical perspectives, theory and models, specific applications with international populations, and emerging perspectives. This handbook is essential for individual practitioners, researchers, psychotherapists, and related mental health professionals, as well as academics with an interest in working with couples and families.

An increasingly important field of research within multilingualism and sociolinguistics, Family Language Policy (FLP) investigates the explicit and overt planning of language use within the home and among family members. However the diverse range of different family units and contexts around the globe necessitates a similarly diverse range of research perspectives which are not yet represented within the field. Tackling this problem head on, this volume expands the scope of families in FLP research. Bringing together contributors and case studies from every continent, this essential reference broadens lines of inquiry by investigating language practices and ideologies in previously under-researched families. Seeking to better reflect contemporary influences on FLP processes, chapters use innovative methodologies, including digital ethnographies and autoethnography, to explore diverse family configurations (adoptive, LGBTQ+, and single parent), modalities (digital communication and signed languages), and speakers and contexts (adult learners, Indigenous contexts, and new speakers). Bringing to light the dynamic, fluid nature of family and kinship as well as the important role that multilingualism plays in family members' negotiation of power, agency, and identity construction, Diversifying Family Language Policy is a state-of-the-art reference to contemporary theoretical, methodological and ethical advances in the field of family language policy.

This two-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population, ITAP 2022, held as part of the 24th International Conference, HCI International 2022, held as a virtual event, during June-July 2022. ITAP 2022 includes a total of 75 papers, which focus on topics related to designing for and with older users, technology acceptance and user experience of older users, use of social media and games by the aging population, as well as applications supporting health, wellbeing, communication, social participation and everyday activities. The papers are divided into the following topical sub-headings. Part I: Aging, Design and Gamification; Mobile, Wearable and Multimodal Interaction for Aging; Aging, Social Media and Digital Literacy; and Technology Acceptance and Adoption: Barriers and Facilitators for Older Adults Part II: Intelligent Environment for Daily Activities Support; Health and Wellbeing Technologies for the Elderly; and Aging, Communication and Social Interaction.

The four-volume set LNCS 6946-6949 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2011, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2011. The 46 papers included in the third volume are organized in topical sections on novel user interfaces and interaction techniques, paper 2.0, recommender systems, social media and privacy, social networks, sound and smell, touch interfaces, tabletops, ubiquitous and context-aware computing, UI modeling, and usability.

This book studies the many different ways in which the lives of the first, third, and fourth generations intersect and the reciprocal benefits that can accrue from establishing positive intergenerational bonds. The unifying feature across the chapters is that the authors view these relationships as a powerful influence on Quality of Life (QoL). The book takes the stance that older adults figure prominently in the QoL of young children, with the latter group defined here as ranging in age from infancy up to and including eight years of age. It examines how bonds with older adults can affect young children’s functioning across developmental domains—physical, emotional, social, and cognitive. It addresses questions of importance to those who have a commitment to the very young such as: “What benefits can young children derive from positive bonds with older adults?”, “How do young children understand the aging process and develop respect for the elderly?”, “How can published research be used to guide both informal and formal interactions between the older generation and the newest one?” and, finally, “How can various stakeholders such as professionals, families, organizations, and communities collaborate to enrich and enlarge the kind and amount of support that older adults provide to the very young child?”