Fieldwork provides essential access to participants’ everyday practices, but this close engagement also exposes researchers to unpredictable ethical dilemmas. Navigating these dilemmas can be challenging for researchers because ethics principles, codes of conduct, or assessment by ethics boards do not address all fieldwork challenges that researchers might encounter. Addressing ethical dilemmas inevitably involves researchers’ own values and judgements, yet, little is known about what and how researchers’ values inform their decisions in practice. This study investigates researchers’ value enactment, drawing on four workshops with 21 participants who conduct user research fieldwork. We identified (1) a collection of values that orient researchers’ practice, extending current understandings of what values operate in design research; and (2) a set of seven questions, each anchored in a declared value that surface recurring tensions in fieldwork. Together, these insights deepen the understanding of ethical decision-making in fieldwork, supporting ethical reflection and value alignment within teams.

Message-based health information dissemination systems can potentially improve maternal and child health (MCH). By conveying health information to parents, SMS- and chatbot-based systems can support parents’ learning and empower them to make better health decisions for their children. However, there is limited design advice for creating message-based dissemination systems for MCH. To help address this gap, we conducted 14 participatory workshops with 42 parents from Portugal and South Africa, exploring how parents learned to care for their children’s health. Our findings showed how parents reflected on the health advice they received, by assessing the fit of the advice to their child’s characteristics, their values and beliefs, the advice’s feasibility, or the intention and competence of the advice giver. Based on these insights, we propose four design implications for creating message-based health information dissemination systems tailored to parents and their children.