Who are the People in my Life? Towards Tangible Eco-Maps

Abstract

Eco-Maps, diagrammatic assessments of family relationships, are used by social workers in individual and family contact to understand the subjective experiences of both supportive and disruptive family, friendship, and community relationships. In this paper we present the first phase of the development of the People in my Life app. We have developed a tangible version of Eco-Maps to unlock the potential of ecomaps in the digital domain and to enhance social work practice with children and young people. The central idea is to develop an improved, technology-based means to assess relationships that supports and enhances social work practice and foregrounds children and young people’s experiences. In particular, the project has three aims: (a) to collaboratively develop with social workers an application for creating ecomaps using touch-screens with tangible objects, (b) to test its usability with children, in the first instance, and (c) to provide a first exploration of the psychometric properties of parameters captured by the app.