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Although competence to live alone is typically associated with measures of activities of daily living, such measures fail to capture problematic situations that older people face in daily life. In particular, little is known about how older homebound women handle potentially harmful incidents. During a descriptive phenomenological study of the experience of reaching help quickly (RHQ) with 40 older homebound women, 33 women spontaneously reported 139 incidents (falls, “tight spots,” near-falls, health problems, and unwanted visitors) that they managed alone. The purpose of this secondary phenomenological analysis of RHQ project data was to describe the experience of those women with handling “close-calls.” Data yielded a typology of close-call incidents and five components of the phenomenon, managing a close-call. In addition to self-directed intentions to lessen the impact of each incident, there were four component phenomena relative to help-seeking, ranging from no mention of need for help (70% of incidents) to managing without desired or solicited help (6% of incidents). Contextual factors, including availability of potential helpers and access to help-seeking devices, influenced intentions in close-calls. Findings are springboards for further research and stimuli for new approaches to practice. Researchers should broaden the focus of competence assessment to take in empirical situations. Further work should be done to explore how older people appraise their status following close-calls and how they move from self-management to consideration of help-seeking and in some cases, on to active help-seeking. Because few close-calls were reported, practitioners could use our typology as an assessment protocol during routine visits. Practitioners can elicit self-management intentions relative to a particular close-call and build dialogue around those intentions, thereby bolstering ability of older women to manage close-calls effectively.

To give an overview of the papers contained in this Special Issue.

Looks at how each of the papers reflects the theme of the Special Issue, “Complexity and IT design and evolution”.

The collection of papers in this Special Issue addresses complexity, drawing on multi‐faceted, multi‐theoretical lines of inquiry.

Frameworks from complexity science, institutional theory, social science, philosophy, and recent thinking in science and technology studies (STS) are used as theoretical lenses to conceptualize and analyze complexity in IS and to offer ways to mitigate it.