Individuals' social class background shapes their life experiences and outcomes, including their familial upbringing and educational attainment. However, we know little about how social class background influences the hiring practices of professional settings, and specifically, the ways in which evaluators conceptualize a potential link between social class background and hiring. Through interviewing 50 evaluators at large technology companies, we find that only 19 of them discussed how social class background affects applicants' access to resources, and none articulated the ties between social class background and preferred interpersonal interactional styles. This is particularly troubling because all evaluators described assessing the key hiring criteria of "innovation potential" based on whether applicants display what we term a "transboundary interactional style." This style involves demonstrating an ease with articulating cross-disciplinary ideas as well as facilitating back-and-forth scholarly conversations and debates. While evaluators characterized this style as stemming from applicants' individual personalities, we draw on past sociological literature to suggest that this style is also cultivated in upper-middle-class environments. Given technology companies' expressed desire to hire a diverse workforce by minimizing biases in evaluators' assessments, we conclude with ideas for evaluators to develop more equitable hiring practices.

Social class contexts shape parents’ guiding principles around teens’ smartphone use. These contexts can affect how parents coach and censor their teens’ smartphone use and can create tensions in the home. Through 174 interviews (87 parent-teen dyads), we find that upper-middle-class families generally adopt an orientation toward scaffolded achievements and working-class families tend to embrace an orientation toward empowered self-sufficiency. We further find that these class-based orientations contribute to parent-teen tensions. For upper-middle-class families, tensions arise when parents insist that teens should use smartphones to get help with academic and enrichment activities and teens disagree about whether their phone-related activities align with this goal. In contrast, we find that conflict can occur in working-class families when teens use their smartphones to get assistance and parents interpret such activity as teens being lazy or not self-sufficient. These findings highlight the role of social class contexts in shaping families’ orientations toward teens’ smartphone use and phone-related tensions.

While studies have shown that graduates from elite universities enjoy high employment rates, they do not tell the story of how students from different social class backgrounds experience the hiring process. We address this question by interviewing upper-middle-class (UMC) and working- and middle-class (WMC) Computer Science Ph.D. students at prestigious universities who are applying for lucrative internships at established technology companies. We find that while these students are aware of and have access to the "same" resources (e.g., social connections and insider knowledge about employers' expectations), the tactics they use to act on these resources and their emotional experience of the hiring process vary along social class lines. In short, the class-based norms of UMC applicants align with those of employers. The majority of WMC applicants, however, discuss experiencing tension between their class-based norms and employers' dominant values. In contrast to their UMC counterparts, these applicants report spending substantial amounts of time preparing for the hiring process and describe the hiring process as emotionally draining. This research provides insight into the emotional burdens facing even the most privileged WMC applicants. Our findings also have implications for how organizations should take into account social class backgrounds in their hiring practices.

To better understand how we can broaden participation in computing, this exploratory study examines the interview process for elite internships at established technology companies. Through conducting 36 interviews with evaluators at technology companies, we find that in addition to technical competence, evaluators often assess internship applicants based on explicit and implicit signals of industrial fit, organizational fit, and individual fit. These evaluative criteria are reminiscent of prior literature linking biases in hiring to social class background. By reflecting on how our findings relate to previous studies, we suggest that evaluators? assessments of fit are potentially linked to social class background, and this might be an invisible factor contributing to hiring biases at technology companies. Given that hiring only culturally similar employees can have negative individual, organizational, and societal consequences, we propose strategies for evaluators to broaden their evaluation perspectives and to enact inclusive interviewing practices. We conclude with a call for further research on the role of social class background in the hiring process.

In a mixed methods study of parents and teens (n=200), 87% (n=174) of participants used language consistent with smartphone addiction narratives when asked about their smartphone feelings and use. Mental health researchers and clinicians do not consistently agree about whether smartphone addiction exists nor what it would look like if it does. Our goal in this study was to explore the patterns of responses that people invoked when talking about the role of smartphones in their lives and the lives of those around them. Responses suggested that both parents and teens are aware of and potentially influenced by a narrative that smartphones are addictive and can lead to negative, though largely undefined, consequences. We examine potential origins of this narrative, including media coverage, and examine the critical need for a deeper examination in the CSCW community of how this narrative could be influencing well-being, sense of self, and sensemaking around smartphone use.