Digital daily activity centres

The project sets out to analyse the digital leap triggered by the lockdown of daily activity centres for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) due to covid-19. During the lockdown, in April 2020, digital activities partly replaced the physical meetings that up until that point have constituted a central feature of these type of venues. Hence, digital activities aiming primarily at maintaining repeated social contact between visitors at daily activity centres, despite palpable expanses of physical distance, is something new that was first triggered by covid-19. The project analyses the digitalization process at five daily activity centres and its future development and relates to the important issue of digital inclusion for individuals with ID.

It includes both a retrospective investigation, looking back at what has been, and a forward-looking exploration, seeking a better understanding of where ongoing changes and developments are headed. Since the process of digital inclusion for individuals with ID is dependent on the support around them, like access to the Internet, digital equipment, knowledge among staff at daily activity centres and sheltered accommodations, access to this support is also scrutinized in the study. The empirical study includes five different daily activity centres that transitioned from primarily having provided face-to-face activities pre covid-19 to instead organizing digital activities following covid-19. These daily activity centres’ digitalization process is studied closely by way of conducting interviews with staff members and visitors, as well as personal assistants and staff connected to the visitors’ places of residency.

For the second study, these interviews are complemented with data gathered by means of performing participant observations at the daily activity centres. Moreover, the digital artefacts produced at these centres are analysed as a part of ‘social connectedness’.

Project objective

The primary purpose of the project is to study the digital inclusion of individuals with ID. This project focuses on the digitalization triggered by the lockdown of daily activity centres for adults with ID in April 2020 due to Covid-19, and its future development.

The project has two interrelated parts.

The first one aims at describing, documenting and analysing the exceptional period of time when adults with ID were not allowed to visit their daily activity centres and the staff at these centres were tasked with keeping up regular contact digitally.

The second part is an explorative study of how the leap of digitalization, triggered by Covid-19, is carried on in the next coming years at the daily activity centres. It will investigate the manner in which the digitalization process continues to change moving forward at the daily activity centres and how this affects the visitors.