Supporting Collaborative Reflection on Personal Values and Health

People with multiple chronic conditions (MCC) need support to understand and articulate how their personal values relate to their health and health care. We developed three prototypes for supporting reflection on values and health and tested them in a qualitative study involving 12 people with MCC. We identified benefits and limitations to building on how patients prepare for visits with clinicians; revealed varying levels of comfort with deep, exploratory reflection involving a facilitator; and found that reflection oriented toward the future could elicit hopeful attitudes and plans for change, while reflection on the past elicited strong resistance. We translated these findings into design guidelines for supporting collaborative reflection on values and health. We also discussed these findings in relation to previous literature on designing for reflection in three areas: shifting between self-guided and facilitator-guided reflection, balancing between outcome-oriented and exploratory reflection, and exploring temporality in reflection.