Qualitative Study

2024 Assessment of Virginia’s Information Ecology of the Disability Services System

Access to disability services information depends on many factors, from an individual’s digital literacy, social connections and physical mobility to the interface design of websites. However, it is also true that the availability of disability services information (e.g., how to apply for a Medicaid Waiver) and how such information is managed and provided to end users in Virginia are also critical factors that shape people’s information access. This assessment focuses on understanding the latter, namely, the “information ecology” of disability services in Virginia.

New Kids on the Block? Exploring Onboarding Strategies of Prospective Professionals in Cybersecurity

This paper explores how prospective professionals, including those outside of educational institutions, approach entering the cybersecurity field. Through qualitative interviews with individuals planning a cybersecurity career, we explore diverse challenges they face during their journey to enter the profession. Our preliminary analysis suggests their challenges may include a lack of awareness of occupational culture, insufficient domain-specific language, visibility into the practitioner community, and differences in expectations between new and practicing professionals.

Data Discretion: Screen-Level Bureaucrats and Municipal Decision-Making

Public servants tasked with implementing rules or policies on the street-level often make discretionary decisions based on local context. Lipsky has labeled them street-level bureaucrats. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as most face-to-face interactions facilitated by local government moved online, many street-level decisions were moved to screens, representing the actions of who Bouvins and Zouridis refer to as screen-level bureaucrats. Discretionary decision-making among public servants continued, but much of it centered on the collection, analysis, and use of data.

Exploring Domestic Workers’ Risk Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While many occupations turned to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic work by definition requires workers to enter other people’s households, and they often work in close proximity to their employers. With domestic workers proactively handling COVID19 risks as part of their already precarious jobs, there is a need for a conceptual understanding of risk management to aid this occupational group during a public health crisis.

Visualizing Local Information Inequality in South Korea: An AI-Based Approach Using Public Library Data

The goal of the project is to understand information inequality across geographical regions in South Korea and visualize them using an AI-backed visualization tool. Our plan, spanning three years, revolves around the development of an intuitive platform for the purpose of visualizing these disparities. During the first year, we aim to construct comprehensive metrics for assessing the level of informational inequality, based on the theory of local information landscapes (LIL theory).

Mapping Information Ecology: Understanding the Fragmentation of Disability Service Information

As organizations and individuals provide various information to multiple systems within a region, the information becomes fragmented, making it difficult for people to access the necessary information. Individuals have limited resources to navigate all the sources and use only part of the available ones. Disability service information is further fragmented due to diverse actors, ranging from government agencies to for-profit organizations, who often provide only partial information.

“I thought I was going to die there:” Socio-political contexts and the plight of undocumented Latinx in the COVID-19 pandemic

Certain U.S. population groups have suffered higher rates of infection and mortality than whites during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Latinx. Public health officials blamed disparities on overcrowded housing and work in essential industries prior to the vaccine’s availability. This study (n=34) focuses on the intersectionality of social locations for undocumented Latinx immigrants living in a relatively affluent suburb and working in the construction and service sectors.

Understanding the Present and Designing the Future of Risk Prediction IT in Fire Departments

This research will develop and design new data-driven risk prediction principles and management (DDRPM) tools that anticipate and manage a variety of community risks, which fire departments are increasingly required to respond to, including medical, fire, and safety emergencies. Today, much of their work focuses on community risk reduction (CRR), a paradigm that seeks to mitigate risks before they lead to emergencies in the first place. The CRR paradigm will leverage new data-driven risk prediction and management (DDRPM) tools to predict and respond to a variety of community risks.

Exploring How Convergence Methods Foster Shared Accountability to Reveal, Map, and Mitigate the Sources and Dynamics of Bias across Social Service Provisioning Systems

Social services, traditionally, have been organized around their missions, such as education or safety or health. A newer approach, called "wrap-around services" or "systems of care," organizes services around individuals and their specific context and needs. These systems face many challenges when applied in real-world settings. Application processes often focus more on the potential of technologies and less on the realities, histories, and needs of communities. The proposed research addresses this gap by evaluating the implementation of a system of care in a real-world setting.

Exploring Secondary Teachers' Needs and Values in Culturally Responsive Teaching

Value sensitive design (VSD) is a methodology that focuses on examining potential stakeholders' values and establishing designers' values of ethical imports in designing a technological system. While this approach provides effective ways to incorporate users' values in technology design, understanding teachers' values in culturally responsive teaching (CRT) poses unique challenges due to their interactions with students' cultural identities, school environments, and community contexts.

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