Digital technologies for social impact – contributions with a focus on digital peer groups and explainable artificial intelligence
Hanna Rebecca Broder · 2026
This dissertation focuses on the social impact of digital technologies and comprises two subjects: "Digital Peer Groups to Alleviate Unemployment" (Subject A) and "Explainable AI to Enhance AI Impact" (Subject B). Subject A expands research on digital peer groups as a tool to alleviate unemployment, with a particular focus on older unemployed individuals. The dissertation designs and evaluates a novel digital peer-group-based approach to address unemployment of older individuals (Paper 1) and develops a taxonomy to analyze and better understand themes discussed in digital peer groups before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (Paper 2). Subject B contributes to research on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to enhance the impact of AI systems for their users. The dissertation assesses the status quo of XAI research in the Information Systems literature and develops a future research agenda through a structured literature review (Paper 3). Furthermore, it examines the impact of automatically generated explanations alongside AI decisions on users' learning from AI feedback (Paper 4), as well as the immediate and prolonged impact of explanations on task performance during and after interaction with AI-based decision support systems (Paper 5). With these contributions, Subject B advances the understanding of how XAI can be designed and deployed to create tangible benefits for users of AI systems. Together, the two subjects illustrate how digital technologies can create social value: by connecting people through digital social support and by making AI more transparent to the people who rely on it.