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

Interrogating the “Us” Versus “Them” Dichotomy in Technology Research with Older Adults

Amanda Lazar , Elissa Carpio , Ruipu Hu , Beth Barnett , Kibron Tesfatsion , Sheena Erete

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This is a thoughtful CHI honorable-mention paper because its main contribution is conceptual and methodological rather than technical: it uses collaborative autoethnography to unsettle an entrenched “us versus them” framing in aging research. The evidence supports a credible reflexive argument, but the scope is necessarily narrow and interpretive.

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 value is that it does not merely add another account of older adults’ technology difficulties; it interrogates the research stance that often makes those difficulties appear as a problem located in “them.” By turning inward, the authors use an 8-month collaborative autoethnography to show that technology burdens are not exclusive to older adults and that some of what gets attributed to aging is better understood as a sociotechnical process unfolding across the life course. That is a meaningful CHI contribution because it combines a critical reframing with a concrete qualitative method for surfacing assumptions researchers may not notice in ordinary user-centered work. The novelty is primarily empirical and interpretive: the paper reports a link between aging and technology issues that it explicitly describes as minimally associated with bodily change, and it uses that finding to build counternarratives to implicit assumptions in HCI. At the same time, the validation scope is intentionally limited. The evidence comes from a small mixed-age team, from a US-based context, and from reflexive thematic analysis of team entries and meetings. That makes the paper persuasive as a methodological and conceptual intervention, but not as a basis for broad generalization about all older adults or all cultural settings. In review terms, I would treat the contribution as strong on field argument and moderate on empirical breadth: it is valuable because it changes how the problem is framed, not because it establishes a universal causal claim. The main caution is overextending the reflexive findings beyond the team and context studied. Within those bounds, the paper is a solid and timely honorable-mention contribution to critical aging research in HCI.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior HCI work on older adults typically centers older adults as the primary population of concern and treats technology difficulties as something experienced by them, often reinforcing an implicit us-versus-them framing.

Departure from common sense

The paper challenges a familiar HCI framing by turning the analytic lens onto the researchers themselves rather than only onto older adults. Instead of assuming technology trouble is mainly an older-adult problem, it uses reflexive autoethnography to show that mixed-age researchers also encounter pervasive technology burdens.

Actual novelty

The paper’s novelty is an empirical reframing: it reports a link between aging and technology issues that is described as minimally associated with age-related bodily changes, and it positions this as a sociotechnical process that can appear earlier in life than conventional aging-centered accounts emphasize.

Evidence

The paper is grounded in an 8-month collaborative autoethnography with a mixed-age research team. The authors analyze team entries and meetings to surface recurring technology issues, interpret them through reflexive thematic analysis, and use the resulting narratives to argue for an expanded understanding of aging as sociotechnical rather than purely age-biomarker driven.

Limits

Method limits

The evidence comes from a small, self-reflexive team study rather than a broad sample, so the findings support interpretive insight more than population-level inference. The method is also shaped by the researchers’ own positionality and by the specific collaborative autoethnographic protocol used over 8 months.

Deployment limits

The approach is best suited to reflexive inquiry in HCI research teams and similar contexts where positionality can be examined directly. It is not a plug-in evaluation method for all settings, and its outputs should not be treated as directly transferable to all older-adult technology contexts without adaptation.

Boundary conditions

The paper’s claims are bounded by the team’s mixed-age composition, US-based context, and the particular technology experiences of the researchers. The reflexive method is most informative where researchers can meaningfully examine their own assumptions and experiences; it may be less informative for groups or settings where such introspection is not feasible.

Manual check: none

Position in field

This sits at the intersection of aging studies, reflexive qualitative methods, and critical HCI. It pushes the field away from treating older adults as a stable other and toward seeing aging and technology use as socially produced, distributed, and already present across the life course.

Abstract

Research on technology for older people focuses on older people’s experiences–and understandably so. However, the phenomena of othering, or seeing this group as different and worse off, is a persistent problem. In this project, we turned inwards through an 8-month collaborative autoethnography to understand our own experiences with technology issues and supporting others in technology use. We found that each member of our mixed age group faced pervasive and burdensome technology issues and recognized that some of the burden is associated with the evolution of technology tools. Our work contributes an expanded understanding of aging as a sociotechnical process and identifies counternarratives to implicit assumptions we held as HCI researchers working with older people. Our research also shows how reflexive positional methods can surface often unexamined experiences with technology issues and aging among researchers.