← CHI 2026 map

CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

A Blessing and a Challenge: Unpacking Boundary Ambiguities Experienced by Caregivers of Older Adults

Tzu-Yu Weng , Karthik S Bhat

DOI PDF Program page Page JSON

This is a solid qualitative CHI paper whose value lies in reframing caregiving as boundary negotiation under ambiguity, not in introducing a new system. The contribution is conceptually useful and well aligned with the interview evidence, but its scope remains bounded by caregiver self-reports and leaves important structural and recipient-side questions open.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

This paper’s strongest contribution is conceptual rather than technical: it takes a familiar caregiving problem and shows that the central issue is often not task coordination alone, but the instability of boundaries around time, attention, identity, and obligation. The use of boundary ambiguity as an analytical lens is a meaningful move because it organizes a set of experiences that might otherwise be treated as isolated coping stories. The findings around internal reframing and external negotiation give the paper a coherent explanatory structure, and the abstract makes clear that the authors are using qualitative evidence from 15 semi-structured interviews to support that structure. That is an appropriate validation mode for the claim being made. At the same time, the paper should be read as a descriptive and interpretive contribution, not as evidence that these boundary patterns are universal or that the proposed design implications have been tested. The limitations matter: the study does not include care recipients, so it cannot speak to mutual boundary negotiation, and it may understate structural constraints such as policy, insurance, or housing that shape what caregivers can actually do. In CHI terms, this is a good honorable-mention-level paper because it offers a clear reframing of an underexamined caregiving experience and connects that reframing to design thinking, while remaining honest about the narrowness of its empirical base. Its impact will likely be strongest as a vocabulary-setting and agenda-setting piece for future work on caregiving technologies and family boundary management.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior HCI work on caregiving tools emphasized logistics and support, but boundary management and role uncertainty were less directly examined in relation to the everyday negotiation of care, work, and family obligations across changing relationships and technologies.

Departure from common sense

The paper argues that caregiving boundaries are not stable lines that can simply be set once and maintained. Instead, they are repeatedly stretched, reconfigured, and made conditional by changing care needs, guilt, and shifting relationships, which runs against a common-sense expectation of clear personal boundaries.

Actual novelty

The paper’s main contribution is not a new tool but a conceptual reframing: it uses boundary ambiguity as an analytical lens to explain caregivers’ boundary negotiation, showing how internal reframing and external negotiation help caregivers manage unstable, permeable, and elastic boundaries, and translating that lens into design implications.

Evidence

The evidence supports a qualitative contribution grounded in 15 semi-structured interviews with caregivers of older adults. The paper’s findings describe recurring boundary-negotiation patterns and explicitly frame them through boundary ambiguity, while the limitations note that care recipients were not interviewed and structural constraints may be underexplored.

Limits

Method limits

The study is a qualitative inquiry based on 15 semi-structured interviews, so it can characterize patterns and meanings in caregivers’ accounts but cannot establish prevalence, causal effects, or generalize beyond the sampled caregiver population and context. It also lacks care-recipient perspectives.

Deployment limits

Design implications are oriented toward digital technologies that support caregivers’ agency and boundary negotiation, but the paper’s own scope suggests these ideas are best treated as conceptual guidance rather than validated interventions. Practical deployment must account for context-specific caregiving relationships and constraints.

Boundary conditions

Findings are bounded by the interviewed caregiver population and by the fact that the analysis centers caregivers’ self-reports. The paper notes that care-recipient perspectives are absent and that structural constraints may limit how much boundary elasticity is possible in practice.

Manual check: No manual check required for the core qualitative claims, but a human reviewer may still want to verify the exact wording of the limitations and the extent to which structural constraints are discussed in the full text.

Position in field

This sits in CHI’s caregiving and family-technology space as a qualitative, theory-informed contribution that shifts attention from caregiving logistics to boundary work. Its value is in naming and organizing an underexamined experience rather than in proposing a deployable system.

Abstract

Stepping into a caregiving role for an aging loved one often means navigating conflicting demands of daily life. While prior Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) research has investigated tools to support the logistics of caregiving, less attention has been directed to boundaries: how caregivers manage them alongside other obligations. Through 15 semi-structured interviews with caregivers of older adults, we unpack caregivers' boundary negotiation, examining how caregivers use boundaries to manage multiple responsibilities and how uncertainty about their roles shapes boundary negotiation. Employing "boundary ambiguity" as an analytical lens, our findings reveal how caregivers use strategies of internal reframing---how they think about their roles---and external negotiation---how they interact with others---to manage their unstable, permeable, and elastic boundaries in everyday life. We discuss how inherent, ongoing boundary ambiguity shapes caregivers' experiences, concluding with design implications for digital technologies that enhance caregivers' agency and support boundary negotiations for caregivers and care recipients.