الإحساس بالتماسك Sense of Coherence

خلال دراستي للدكتوراة استكشفت مواضيع متعددة ، من الأمور التي التقطتها و علقت بخاطري هو مفهوم الإحساس بالتماسك و الارتباط  إن صح التعبير

استمريت في البحث عنه و ما زلت استكشف علاقاته بأمور مختلفة ، فما علاقة أن يكون إحساس تماسك الشخص عالي على سرعة تعلمه و كفاءته ؟ المفهوم بالأصل مرتبط بإحساس الشخص بالتماسك و جودة صحته و تعافيه ( بالمعنى الصحي) فهو يدرس بالاصل لماذا لا يمرض الناس. أو أسباب العافية. أو لنقل بلغة أخرى علم أصول العافية

Salutogenesis

من فترة لأخرى أعود لأبحث في هذا الموضوع ، فقد جذب اهتمامي بوضوح. و هنا أضع خلاصة مولدة بالذكاء الاصطناعي

HCI / THEORY-INFORMED DESIGN / EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS

CHI-style extended abstract · Working review
Prepared 19 October 2026

AbstractScopePopulationsPatternsEvidenceImplicationsReferences

Literature synthesis · HCI / Digital experience / Salutogenesis

Sense of Coherence in Technology Design and Use

A comparative account of studied populations, nuanced socio-technical difficulties, theoretical applications, and strength of evidence.

Source-bounded research report · Based exclusively on user-supplied papers · Analytical synthesis; not a submitted or peer-reviewed review article

09uploaded PDF files

08distinct publications

05explicit SoC applications

03adjacent / non-SoC papers

Abstract

Sense of Coherence (SoC), originating in Antonovsky's salutogenic theory, concerns whether circumstances are experienced as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. This bounded literature synthesis compares eight publications supplied by the researcher (2020–2026), including five direct applications of SoC and three theoretically adjacent works. Across older-adult robotics, mobile health, healthcare information infrastructure, instant messaging, and language-model assessment, SoC appears in distinct methodological roles: a qualitative interpretive lens, a design-science specification framework, an experimentally tested individual-difference moderator, or a computational psychometric target. Cross-study comparison shows that similar dimensions can describe different problems: technological unpredictability, limited operating resources, institutionally fragmented care, and competing social demands. The evidence is strongest for SoC's usefulness in organizing accounts of experience and articulating intended design qualities; it is insufficient, within this corpus, to establish that designing for SoC causally improves usability, sustained engagement, or well-being. We identify measurement and construct-boundary questions that future HCI work would need to resolve before making stronger intervention claims.

Keywords: sense of coherence; salutogenesis; HCI; technology experience; human–robot interaction; mHealth; digital well-being; theory-informed design; evidence synthesis.

01 / FRAMING AND METHOD

What was examined—and what was not

This synthesis is a structured comparison of a supplied, purposively assembled corpus; it is not a systematic or scoping review. The nine PDFs represented eight distinct papers because two files were identical copies of Williams et al. (2022). For each paper, we extracted the target population or unit of analysis, technology context, reported difficulties, use of SoC, main findings, and limitations. Statements about observed participants are separated from authors' theoretical explanations and this report's cross-paper interpretations.

Direct SoC (n = 5): A paper explicitly employs the SoC construct as an analytic lens, design/specification framework, measured human variable, or computational assessment target. References [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Related but not direct (n = 3): A paper uses salutogenic design without testing the three-dimensional SoC construct; cites SoC as background to a different theory; or measures meaningfulness without claiming SoC. References [6], [7], [8].

The construct must not be reduced to three interface features

Antonovsky's SoC describes an overarching orientation toward life and the demands it presents. Comprehensibility is broadly cognitive (demands appear coherent and intelligible); manageability concerns the perceived availability of resources to meet them; and meaningfulness expresses their motivational significance. These domains can be used as a lens on technology experiences, but a comprehensible interface is not itself evidence that a user's global SoC has increased. This distinction is fundamental to interpreting the papers. [1] [3] [9]

01 · COGNITIVE

Comprehensibility

Demands and situations appear intelligible, structured, and reasonably predictable.

Design-facing question
Can people make sense of the situation and the system's behavior?

02 · INSTRUMENTAL

Manageability

Resources are perceived as available and adequate for dealing with demands.

Design-facing question
Can people draw on controls, skills, help, and other resources to respond?

03 · MOTIVATIONAL

Meaningfulness

Engaging with the demands of the situation is perceived as worthwhile.

Design-facing question
Does the activity matter in relation to the person's own commitments and goals?

Figure 1. Taxonomy of how SoC is used across the five direct papers. Arrows organize the discussion from interpretation to specification to testing; they do not assert that those stages were completed in sequence or that design interventions were validated.

02 / CROSS-STUDY COMPARISON

Who was studied, what was difficult, and what SoC explained

The central comparison is at the level of situated problems, not merely demographic categories. A perceived lack of control, for example, may involve physical robot movement, an inaccessible touchscreen, disjointed clinical services, or conflicting messaging expectations. These problems should not be treated as interchangeable outcomes.

Table 1. Populations, contextual difficulties, SoC role, and supportable conclusions. In the five direct SoC rows, the account is drawn from the papers; the other three rows establish conceptual boundaries. n indicates the reported study sample, not a pooled population.

Showing all 8 distinct studies

Source / context	Population or unit	Nuanced difficulties and tensions	Actual use of SoC	Conclusion supported by the paper
Saplacan et al. · 2020 Assistive / domestic robots DIRECT SoC [1]	16 reported older participants, Norway; independent-living accommodation; group and pilot interviews. Some people attended more than one session.	Technological change outpaced familiarity, causing exclusion and fear of mistakes. Participants valued predictable motion, controls (including stop/voice), Norwegian-language interaction, physical safety, autonomy, and concrete practical benefit rather than robotic novelty.	SoC was introduced as an interpretive lens in discussion of qualitative findings about introducing robots into everyday life.	Researchers argue that understandable, manageable, personally meaningful robots are important to integration and acceptance; no tested increase in users' SoC was shown.
Piculell et al. · 2021 SMART4MD mobile health app DIRECT SoC [2]	16 adults aged 71–100, Sweden, with cognitive impairment, interviewed after app exposure.	Memory and visual difficulties, touchscreen operation, changing features, non-native-language notifications, slow responses, reliance on family assistance; a supplied tablet sometimes duplicated paper notes or more portable phones. Desire for face-to-face clinical contact persisted.	Deductive thematic analysis using comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness as organizing domains.	The application was perceived as both potentially useful and challenging. Its personal relevance, learnability, accessible support, and familiarity shaped engagement. Qualitative interpretation—not intervention efficacy.
Williams et al. · 2022 Hospital information infrastructure DIRECT SoC [3]	Target: hospital patients and care experience. Framework input: clinical, technical, and operational knowledge. No SoC patient-outcome sample reported.	Fragmented information, opaque processes, poorly coordinated scheduling and communication, environmental stressors, and reduced capacity to understand or influence care across people, places, and processes.	Design science: articulates desired patient experiences using SoC, maps them to specific resistance resources and information capabilities.	Offers a formal method for connecting infrastructure decisions to experience goals. Authors indicate further work is needed to validate experience statements and application of the framework.
Reuben et al. · 2025 Pretrained language models DIRECT SoC · COMPUTATIONAL [4]	88 language models; subset of seven models in adaptation experiments. Not a human population; preprint.	Questionnaire-response bias, prompt-formulation sensitivity, difficulties using human psychometric instruments for nonconversational models, and interpretation of model response patterns.	Transforms SoC-13 into natural-language-inference prompts to estimate construct-like patterns across models.	Reports correlations and text-adaptation changes in model scores. This is not evidence that models experience human SoC or that users' SoC changes.
Lutz et al. · 2026 Instant messaging pressure DIRECT SoC · EMPIRICAL [5]	162 adult messenger users in SoC experiment (Study 4); mean age 30.59, 70% women. Four-experiment paper overall: N = 265, 297, 193, 162.	Pressure for immediate replies; interrupted tasks; social expectations versus autonomy; perceived failure of control, frustrated competence, negative affect, and stress. Connection with others conflicts with task demands.	10-item human SoC measure tested as moderator of a manipulated high/low availability-pressure vignette.	High pressure affected autonomy/competence experiences; expected buffering by SoC was mostly unsupported. Some significant patterns were inconsistent or opposite to expectations.
Faw et al. · 2021 VR symphonic experiences ADJACENT [6]	16 adults aged 76–90; included three living with dementia and two spousal caregivers; six focus groups.	Barriers to in-person activities; unfamiliarity with VR; headset comfort and eyewear problems; weaker immersion for participants with dementia; desire for enjoyment, connection, and otherwise inaccessible experiences.	Salutogenic design (engagement, distraction, connectedness); not an explicit three-dimension SoC analysis or SoC scale.	Enhanced VR experiences elicited stronger preferences and positive perceptions than replication-style VR; no SoC-specific outcome established.
Xu & Ge · 2025 NewsWood / digital well-being ADJACENT [7]	Conceptual paper; no participant sample for an intervention evaluation.	Digital placelessness, context collapse, fragmented attention, feeling overwhelmed, algorithmically constrained exploration, and tensions between predictable structure and openness.	Cites Antonovsky's SoC work but develops a distinct felt structure–unstructuredness theory; not a SoC study.	Proposes design affordances and a speculative storytelling illustration; not empirical validation of SoC-based designs.
Xu · 2026 AI-supported learning NOT SoC [8]	272 university students, aged 18–21, across five disciplinary groupings; survey of AI tool users.	Immersive AI interactions, tailored affirmation, learner self-perception, and the personal significance of learning.	Studies learning meaningfulness, a separate construct. SoC theory is not operationalized.	Reports a cross-sectional statistical mediation model. Does not show causal changes in SoC or provide direct SoC evidence.

Sampling note. For Saplacan et al., the paper reports 16 participants and also notes repeat attendance across group sessions; it does not justify inferring 16 independent sessions. For Williams et al., targeted patients must not be misrepresented as a recruited, experimentally evaluated SoC patient sample. For Lutz et al., n = 162 is the SoC-specific experiment; the larger four-study total includes studies of other moderators.

03 / THEORETICAL SYNTHESIS

Similar dimensions, different socio-technical stressors

The explanatory value of SoC is not simply that three labels recur. The labels offer different ways to locate an experience within a person–technology–context relationship. The matrix below is our analytical recoding of concerns reported in the papers, not the authors' common coding scheme, a comparable scale, or a quantitative effect matrix.

Context →
Domain ↓

Domestic robots [1]

Mobile health [2]

Digital care systems [3]

Comprehensibility
Making sense

What does this device actually do, and how will it move?

What do icons, notifications, features, and evolving software mean?

What will happen during care, and is information understandable?

Manageability
Resources & control

Can I stop, direct, and safely coexist with the robot?

Can I operate the interface with my skills, memory, and available help?

Can I coordinate and influence care through responsive people and systems?

Meaningfulness
Worthwhile engagement

Does this robot offer a practical benefit in my daily life?

Does this app solve a problem I actually have better than familiar tools?

Do care processes respect my values, goals, and desired participation?

Figure 2. Context-sensitive interpretation of the SoC dimensions. The first two columns derive from observed user accounts; the hospital column includes intended experiences from a proposed framework. The cells are not tested measures of SoC.

PATTERN 01

Manageability is more than individual skill

Control depends on material properties (robot motion and interfaces), social resources (family help), and institutional capabilities (care coordination). Treating difficulty as a user deficit misses these dependencies.

Supported as cross-paper interpretation of [1], [2], [3].

PATTERN 02

Ease of use does not establish meaningfulness

A learnable technology may still be redundant, intrusive, or unrelated to people's priorities. The question is not only whether something can be used, but why a person would invest effort in using it.

Supported qualitatively by [1] and [2]; not an experimentally isolated SoC component.

PATTERN 03

The same demand can conflict with other goals

In messaging, expectations of social availability can simultaneously imply maintaining connection and interrupting goal-directed activity. High pressure consistently challenged autonomy and competence.

Experimentally studied in [5]; SoC's hypothesized protective moderation was not generally confirmed.

PATTERN 04

SoC is used at different analytical levels

The construct may characterize a person's general orientation, an interpretation of a particular technology experience, a proposed design specification, or a language-model response profile. These are different objects of analysis.

Scope and construct-boundary synthesis based on [1]–[5].

04 / EMPIRICAL WEIGHT AND CLAIM CALIBRATION

What can legitimately be concluded?

A methodologically credible synthesis must distinguish interpretive utility, design-specification utility, and demonstrated intervention effectiveness. They are separate claims requiring different kinds of evidence.

Table 2. Calibrated conclusions restricted to the eight-paper corpus. “Not established” means this collection does not demonstrate the claim; it does not establish that the claim is false.

Claim	Status in this corpus	Reason / evidence
SoC organizes nuanced accounts of users' technology experiences.	Supported qualitatively	Robotics and mHealth studies explicitly analyze or discuss user experiences through SoC [1] [2].
SoC can be translated into intended design qualities and system capabilities.	Framework proposed	The hospital study links SoC-based experience statements to resources, processes, and information capabilities; additional validation remains necessary [3].
SoC reliably buffers the effects of social-pressure demands from messaging.	Not supported as hypothesized	In the SoC experiment, moderation paths were mostly non-significant or inconsistent, despite evidence of availability-pressure effects [5].
Making technology more comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful increases users' global SoC.	Not established	No direct SoC paper in this corpus demonstrates a controlled, evaluated design intervention changing validated human SoC scores.
SoC accounts for user outcomes beyond usability, perceived control, self-efficacy, or self-determination.	Not established	Comparative incremental-validity tests against these alternatives are not demonstrated in this bounded set.
Findings transfer without adjustment to informal programming learners or the wider population.	Not established	Populations, stimuli, research designs, and underlying outcomes differ substantially; transfer requires new study.

Figure 3. Evidentiary coverage, not effect sizes or comparative counts. Bar length is purely schematic and does not represent quantity or strength of effects. Findings from non-SoC adjacent papers cannot fill the missing intervention-efficacy category.

Interpretive caution

Comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness can label either qualities of a system, users' situated appraisals, or dimensions of a general psychological orientation. The papers do not demonstrate that these levels are equivalent. Claiming that an interface “increases SoC” therefore requires a separately justified operationalization, validated measurement, and a suitable comparative study.

05 / DESIGN IMPLICATIONS AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

From useful framing to a testable contribution

For designers, the immediate contribution of this collection is diagnostic: SoC prompts investigators to ask not only whether an interaction succeeds, but whether the whole situation is understandable, resourced, and personally worth engaging with. To make a stronger scientific contribution, future work needs to test the added explanatory or intervention value of that framing.

Characterize the stressor

Document situations where users lose clarity, resources, or significance.

→

Derive and justify affordances

Trace features to an explicit mechanism and alternatives in HCI theory.

→

Test outcomes independently

Measure situated experiences, behavior, and validated SoC distinctly.

This sequence is a proposal by this report, not a procedure implemented or validated by the reviewed papers.

Illustrative transfer: informal online programming learning

The papers do not study informal programming learners using SoC. The following examples are therefore hypotheses for future investigation, not results of the corpus. They illustrate how a different population would require contextual reinterpretation rather than direct transplantation of existing findings.

Understand the learning state

Comprehensibility · proposed mechanism

Make current progress, errors, prerequisites, and next steps easier to interpret across disconnected tutorials.

Test: accuracy of learner explanations, perceived task clarity, and independent resolution attempts.

Mobilize available resources

Manageability · proposed mechanism

Expose feasible next actions, prior work, help pathways, and strategies for resuming after interruption.

Test: re-entry success, help-seeking, task completion, and perceived coping resources.

Connect action to purpose

Meaningfulness · proposed mechanism

Connect immediate exercises with learner-defined projects and longer-term intentions, without imposing external goals.

Test: personally articulated relevance, voluntary continuation, and reasons for discontinuing.

Priority questions for a stronger HCI study

Unresolved question	Why it matters	Credible test
Is situated coherence distinct from global SoC?	Prevents construct conflation between interface experience and an enduring psychological orientation.	Establish conceptual definitions, expert review, convergent/discriminant validity, and stability across tasks.
Does SoC add explanatory power?	Shows why the theory is needed beyond perceived usability, self-efficacy, perceived control, and self-determination.	Pre-specified comparative models using theoretically justified covariates and outcomes.
Can specific design features change a relevant experience?	Moves beyond retrospective interpretation to intervention evidence.	Compare a theory-guided prototype with a credible alternative; predefine primary outcomes and collect usage evidence.
For whom and under which conditions?	Addresses the different resources, goals, and pressures across populations.	Study diverse users and stressors; report contextual boundary conditions and null results.

06 / THREATS TO INTERPRETATION

Limitations of this synthesis

Selection and coverage

The corpus was provided rather than generated by a reproducible search. No database query, eligibility screening, forward/backward citation tracing, critical-appraisal protocol, or quantitative meta-analysis was conducted. Statements about what is “missing” apply to these eight papers, not the full HCI literature.

Population heterogeneity

The studies span adults experiencing age-related challenges, patient-care contexts, convenience-sample messenger users, university students, and language models. Their units, measurements, and outcomes cannot be pooled meaningfully.

Strength of causal inference

Qualitative studies support contextual interpretation rather than causal effectiveness. The hospital paper proposes a framework. The 2026 messaging experiments manipulate perceived demand, not a SoC-informed interface intervention. The AI-learning study is cross-sectional and does not investigate SoC.

Publication and construct boundaries

The language-model paper is identified as an arXiv preprint in the supplied file. Salutogenic VR, felt structure, and learning meaningfulness remain adjacent constructs; including them as if they measured SoC would overstate the evidence.

Concluding synthesis. In this bounded set of publications, the strongest contribution of SoC to technology research is interpretive and specification-oriented: it highlights how the intelligibility of circumstances, access to coping resources, and personally valued purposes shape technology-related experiences. The critical open question is not whether these dimensions can describe user problems, but whether operationalizing them yields distinctive, measurable design benefits beyond established HCI constructs.

07 / SOURCE REFERENCES

References

References [1]–[8] are the eight distinct supplied publications, ordered by analytical role (direct SoC first, related work second). [9] is a foundational book cited by the reviewed literature; it was not independently included as an analyzed primary source.

1. Saplacan, D., Herstad, J., & Pajalic, Z. (2020). An analysis of independent living elderly's views on robots: A descriptive study from the Norwegian context. In ACHI 2020: The Thirteenth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (pp. 113–122). IARIA.

   Supplied PDF: achi_2020_5_10_20011.pdf · Direct SoC / qualitative
2. Piculell, E., Skär, L., Sanmartin Berglund, J., Anderberg, P., & Bohman, D. (2021). Using a mobile application for health communication to facilitate a sense of coherence: Experiences of older persons with cognitive impairment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(21), 11332. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111332

   Direct SoC / qualitative interviews
3. Williams, P. A. H., Lovelock, B., & Cabarrus, J. A. (2022). A sense of coherence approach to improving patient experience using information infrastructure modeling: Design science research. JMIR Formative Research, 6(4), e35418. https://doi.org/10.2196/35418

   Direct SoC / design-science framework · Duplicate copy among supplied PDFs
4. Reuben, M., Slobodin, O., Elyshar, A., Cohen, I.-C., Braun-Lewensohn, O., Cohen, O., & Puzis, R. (2025). Assessment and manipulation of latent constructs in pre-trained language models using psychometric scales (arXiv:2409.19655v2). https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19655

   Direct SoC / computational assessment · Supplied version labeled arXiv preprint, 13 Jan 2025
5. Lutz, S., Schneider, F. M., & Halfmann, A. (2026). Staying healthy despite social pressure to be available? An experimental application of the Integrative Model of Mobile Media Use and Need Experiences (IM3UNE). Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 21, 100977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2026.100977

   Direct SoC / experimental study (SoC tested in Study 4)
6. Faw, M. H., Buley, T., & Malinin, L. H. (2021). Being there: Exploring virtual symphonic experience as a salutogenic design intervention for older adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 541656. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.541656

   Adjacent / salutogenic design without SoC operationalization
7. Xu, C., & Ge, X. (2025). Reimagining digital well-being: A theoretical framework based on the psychology of felt structure and illustrated through creative storytelling. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), Article CSCW215. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757396

   Adjacent / theoretical design framework; SoC background citation
8. Xu, X. (2026). Modeling the impact of artificial intelligence immersive interaction on learning meaningfulness: The mediating role of narcissistic traits. In The 3rd International Conference on Educational Digitalization and Computer Science in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (EDCS 2026) (pp. 1786–1791). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3828183.3828458

   Adjacent / learning meaningfulness, not SoC
9. Antonovsky, A. (1987). Unraveling the mystery of health: How people manage stress and stay well. Jossey-Bass.

   Theoretical foundation cited by included papers; original text not separately assessed

SoC × Technology Experience · Bounded research synthesis · Prepared 19 October 2026

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