Dear Vicky,

While I don’t have immediate thoughts that will help, I do have some methodological thoughts you may find useful. Because you are reaching outside the HCI world to seek answers from several fields, you might want to look at fields where these issues arise. 

The book that Terry Love recommended is interesting, but narrow and not really focused on the issues of confession. John Cornwell’s The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession is more a history and sociology of religion in the specific context of the Roman Catholic Church than it is a generally applicable analysis of confidential and confessional services. Rather, Cornwell examines the way in which very specific confessional formats and changes in confession practice gave rise to problems with the power of the priesthood and the right to dispense absolution depending solely on the confessor.

This is in some ways related to the ways in which other kinds of professionals abuse similar powers, but I’d suggest you look farther.

The great thing about being at a major university in a great university region such as Cambridge and Boston is that you have within a short walk or a quick phone call access to leading experts in many related fields — clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatric social work, law, general medicine, pastoral counseling, general counseling, university counseling services, drug counseling services, and more. There is also a heavy element of confession and self-revelation in such programs as Alcoholics Anonymous, and in the more open revelation of Quaker meetings.

If you do a serious literature review, you’ll turn up a massive literature of books and articles. You’ll need to use a variety of search terms — you’ll get too much, but as you read abstracts, you’ll get a sense of the field, and you can narrow and trim to select for the material that will serve you best.    

The question of affordances in HCI based confessional services is different and more nuanced. A great deal of the power of confession or confidential disclosure involves that fact that one human being shares personal experiences with another human being in face-to-face self-disclosure. 

You might want to look at some of the literature of therapy, not because it is necessarily confessional, but because it provides information on the therapeutic “affordances” of human therapeutic interaction. Carl Rogers’s work is especially useful in this context. 

You can also find a valuable source in three remarkable books by Frederick S. Perls, a psychiatrist and one of the founders of gestalt therapy. Three of Perls’s books transcribe workshop demonstrations of Perls’s therapeutic technique — Eyewitness to Therapy, In and Out the Garbage Pail, and Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. The use of these materials lies in the way that they allow you to “hear” the voices of therapeutic interaction in a sensitive, direct way. These are real cases, transcribed in real time, then written on the printed page.

This is a great deal more work than I expect you thought you might have to do. If your goal is to create an HCI project that serves this purpose in any reasonable way, this is the kind of work that you will require. Nearly anyone who does *human* counseling or confessional work spends the better part of a decade in education, development, formation, and training before he or she is allowed to work with a real human being in pastoral care or the confessional, or as a counseling client or therapeutic patient. 

Understanding the dynamics of confidential or confessional interaction involves a great deal of learning. To make these dynamics work requires professional skills and mastery. To make these dynamics work when the relationship takes place between a human being and a system is far more difficult — this raises questions that have not been addressed in a deep way in the literature of any of these fields.  

One reason that most HCI applications do not provide the same affordances as human beings do for confidential or confessional interaction is that the people who design these have not dug deep enough to understand just what it is that occurs in the confidential or confessional context.   

This is not a generalized kind of statement. My doctoral field was human behavior. Many of my classmates were psychologists and psychiatrists, as were half of my professors. At the end of my course work, I came away with a profound sense that I would not be a good therapist.

While I apologize for suggesting far more work than you probably want to do, this is what you must do if you want to meet the human needs of confidential or confessional work.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

—

Vicky Zeamer wrote:

—snip—

I am surveying how different confidential/confessional services are
designed. In particular, I am interested in how services affordances are
developed in order to satisfy user needs (what are these?) of those who are
looking for answers to sensitive questions in a secretive way, or those who
are looking to "confess" something. Think, "Is it normal for XYZ?" I ask the
list as I am interested in seeing a variety of use cases outside of my own
HCI world.

—snip—


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