Research

We identified demand for increased paternal engagement in maternal health, finding that men lack knowledge about their wives' health details and both genders perceive insufficient conversation (Ahmad et al. 2022), and we demonstrated that speech-based entertainment platforms are significantly more effective than text-based social media for reaching and retaining low-literate users while delivering health information (Naseem et al. 2020; St-Onge Ahmad et al. 2017; Kharal et al. 2017).

We tested three engagement mechanisms on a voice platform and found that targeted strategies increased health content creation 13-fold and information sharing 3-fold, but discovered a critical paradox: aggressive content moderation reduced misinformation by 97% yet paradoxically decreased overall exposure to beneficial health information by 21-29% (Raza et al. 2022; Hirshleifer et al. 2022).

We tested the impact of voice gender and formality in IVR systems for low-literate populations in patriarchal contexts, finding that male participants trusted male voices more, formal voices made myths seem accurate to male participants, and female participants demonstrated greater knowledge of maternal health facts (Mubarak et al. 2020).

We studied digital safe spaces in South Asia and found that they allow women to circumnavigate the patriarchal gaze and provide peer support (Younas et al. 2020), that creating these spaces empowers moderators contrary to existing literature portraying moderation as burden (Ammari et al. 2022), and that designing speech-based safe spaces for low-literate women requires navigating real-world constraints including novel authentication mechanisms like two-pin systems (Naseem et al. 2020).

We found that image-based abuse in South Asian contexts functions fundamentally differently than Western frameworks, with perpetrators sharing culturally sensitive but non-sexual images with victims' male family members to cause severe social harm, revealing how social media companies' Western definitions fail to protect victims (Batool et al. 2024); through global research, we found that women perceive greater harm from online harassment than men, especially for non-consensual image sharing, and prefer platform responses like content removal and user banning (Im et al. 2022).

We found that Muslim-American women face intersectional online privacy risks across three dimensions (as Muslim-Americans broadly through Islamophobic harassment, as Muslim-American women specifically through reputational harm for taboo content, and based on individual religious practices), requiring digital privacy design principles that account for overlapping marginalized identities (Afnan et al. 2022).

We developed a novel measure of community digital capacity addressing a critical gap in individual digital literacy assessments, capturing three domains (individual, social, infrastructure) that reveal digital inequities in the context of systemic and structural challenges faced by marginalized populations (Dillahunt et al. 2025); our exploratory analysis across 553 U.S. respondents identified a three-factor structure as a foundation for assessing whether people can access shared digital resources and activities (Dillahunt et al. 2024).

We found that Afghan refugees' adaptation strategies during resettlement are shaped by gender and collectivist cultural values, with strategic choices in support-seeking varying by shared versus non-shared identity with host community members, and tensions between economic adaptation and preserving sociocultural values, particularly through creative collective solutions by women (Batool et al. 2024); through interviews with co-design facilitators working in 43 countries, we found that power differentials based on educational background, language barriers, and gender prevent true collaboration, particularly when tools require literacy and advanced training (Jiang et al. 2022); and we found that low-income African-American pregnant women seek information from multiple sources, treat formal medical sources no differently than other sources, and request material and social support alongside medical information, suggesting video testimonials by experienced mothers are particularly effective (Burleson et al. 2020).

We found that data falsification by front-line immunization workers in Pakistan is common, and that mid-level supervisors employ multiple detection strategies (triangulation, supplementary data collection, anomaly detection, interrogation) that correlate with their management style, with implications for designing technologies to monitor and manage front-line data (Batool et al. 2021).