Oh, clarity, I barely knew ye …

Currently trying to put the finishing touches on my research proposal. Keep losing the ability to tell what is important. I’ve read so much and feel that I need a few days for everything to digest in my subconscious. The research proposal as it stands feels a bit thrown together. There are some gaping holes and things just aren’t hanging together as nicely as I’d like them to. I’m not sure whether to look into appropriation literature, or just to give an account of the appropriation in the form of a summary and analysis of user behaviour. I suppose I should at least find out the best way to do this. The big problems I’m coming up against here is that I’m dealing with a lot of really new things that have hardly been covered in the literature. Technologies for behavioural change, pervasive technologies, API based web services (technologies that are in a sense designed solely for appropriation, there is little assumption about how they should be used). All of this is pretty new, so I’m finding it a bit hard to ground myself in the literature. Obviously, there is nothing at all on micro-blogging, so I need to look at what I can – existing technologies for behavioural change, technologies similar to micro-blogging (maybe….).

Hopefully I can get my proposal looking respectable. I think it’s almost there. I realise that at regular intervals through my research I’ve been waiting for times when things become clear. They seem to be few and far between. I put a lot of work into my presentation last week, but most of that work, while good for my background knowledge, is not helping me at all right now. I suppose I just need to get used to this state of incompletion, or lay down some ‘milestones for understanding’ so that I can feel like I’m getting somewhere. First milestone, what is appropriation in this context and how should I deal with it?

hmm…

This is the research question

Just had a meeting with my supervisor and have settled on one of the options from the last post. Drumroll, please:

How is micro-blogging appropriated for smoking cessation?

The basic research design is still similar. I will get three groups of three people from an online community and place them into groups on twitter. At the end of a two-week trial I will interview all of the participants and then code and perform a simple statistical analysis of their posts.

Rather than using psychological models of behavioural change as a lense for my enquiry, I will be using the characteristics of temporality, placedness, reflexivity and social supportiveness established recently in the HCI literature. My justification for this is that these characteristics have emerged from  research that has taken the psychological models into account. I will use these as a starting point and observe how each of these characteristics is manifest in micro-blogging and hopefully refine their definitions and add any other characteristics that may become apparent along the way. In this way I am grounded more in the field of HCI.

So what is the contribution here?

• Description of micro-blogging being appropriated for smoking cessation
• Contribution to theories of technology for behavioural change
• Design guidelines for using micro-blogging to aid in smoking cessation

Basically, it is a technology trial with some theoretical outcomes rather than requirement outcomes.

Questioning research questions…

Things seem to stay stable round here for a maximum of about five minutes.

After settling on the following research question:

What effect does interpersonal awareness have on self-efficacy for behavioural change?

I became increasingly concerned that my view of self-efficacy, the confidence in one’s own ability to refrain from engaging in a particular behaviour, was too simplistic. I believed it was something that could be easily measured and something that needed to be high in order to effect behavioural change. After reading a few papers and meeting with Ron Borland at the Cancer Council Today, I have realised that Self-Efficacy, and indeed many of the internal and external variables in behavioural change, is a strange beast. Depending on the stage of the quit attempt, and depending on the strength of other characteristics, high self-efficacy can have either a positive or negative effect. For example, high self-efficacy combined with insufficient coping skills results in the individual being overconfident and failing to refrain from the behaviour. Also, with a small sample size a measure of this kind would be next to meaningless.

Ron then suggested a different kind of study, where I could attempt to identify what characteristics of micro-blogging address the psychological constructs known to be important in behaviour change. I could get my participants to sign up to twitter and use it for a couple of weeks. I could then observe their posting behaviour and survey/interview them with a view to finding out how the technology was used in relation to those key constructs. For example, did they use it to reflect on their position or to request help. Did they feel it was useful? Do they feel it had an effect on the outcome? While I was taken with this idea for a couple of hours, when talking it over with one of my supervisors I was alerted to the fact that this is merely a technology review. In order to make a contribution to the literature I need to go a step further. Being able to elicit some design guidelines from the data may be enough, but it may not be. I will find out tomorrow when I talk to my main supervisor.

I have since fallen into the idea of focusing on the concepts of temporality, placedness, reflexivity and social supportiveness, which have been identified as possible important characteristics when designing technology to assist in behavioural change. Rather than using the psychological concepts as a lense, I could use these as a lense to probe the users’ experiences and see if they are sufficient, what they mean in the context of micro-blogging (how they manifest) and how micro-blogging services could be better to designed to enhance these characteristics and any others which become evident through the investigation. Again, I’m not sure how significant the contribution is here. The only real difference between this and the previous option is the choice of lense. In this one I am taking for granted some design guidelines and seeing how they hold up and can possibly be elaborated upon or added to. In the previous one I am making no assumptions on design guidelines, instead I am starting from principles of behaviour change and hopefully waiting for design guidelines to emerge. It may be that the existing research into technology for behavioural change has already taken this into account and there is no need for me to dive to that level again. Perhaps it is useful to refine, elaborate and extend the existing guidelines in the literature.

Ok, so, any other big ideas before I sign off? I think some kind of contribution related to design guidelines is a useful one. I’m pretty much following the model of Consolvo et al’s (2006) trial of their mobile phone application to encourage physical activity, only in my case I am not designing the artefact to be tested, I’m just taking advantage of an existing one – just being a connectionist. Whether this contribution is significant is the subject of tomorrow morning’s meeting.

Nailing a research question…

… is really not that easy.

I felt a bit disillusioned after my meeting with my supervisors a few days ago. The realisation about research that was forming when I wrote my last post still hadn’t really kicked in, so I ended up diverging a jumbled mess of words and desires. I also really struggled to grasp exactly what my supervisor was on about at times, as he put forward ideas that I thought were irrelevant or by changing a couple of words in one of my sentences rendered it seemingly incomprehensible or changed the domain entirely. I started to feel like I needed 20 years of research up my belt in order to get anywhere. On later reflection, I realised that this is what research is all about. There are many kinds of stories that can be told about any situation, problem or relationship. You just have to follow your intuition, logic, interests and (of course) the literature until things start to settle down. And they finally have:

What influence does micro-blogging have over perceived social support?

This is the question I settled on yesterday, and already it has started to change. Firstly, a justification for watering down my desire to design something. In order to evaluate a user interface within the scope of an honours degree, it would have to be quite simple and targeted on a specific kind of interaction. The design ideas I have in my head for a twitter/facebook mashup to help people quit smoking are waaaay too complicated for me to tackle in the time I have. So instead I decided to focus on the assumption that was the underlying motivation for making the choice to use twitter: that micro-blogging will help people feel more supported. By pairing up or forming small groups, quitting smokers will be able to share their thoughts about their quit attempt, express frustration and joy and maintain an awareness of how others are in the group, an awareness which may encourage direct support in the form of an instant message or SMS.

As I write this, however, I’m beginning to wonder if social support is the right construct to be measuring. While trying to find an established questionnaire to measure it, I noticed that studies often measure a variety of constructs, including:

• Perceived social support
• Self-esteem
• Hopefulness
• Self-efficacy

One may expect that levels of self-esteem, hopefulness and self-efficacy would increase as perceived social support increases, although they may be affected by other things as well. Micro-blogging has two major affordances for wellbeing: reflexiveness and awareness. Users can reflect on their trajectory (as well as that of others), as well as enabling others to have an awareness of their thoughts, feelings and actions. This awareness may lead to an increase in the amount of support given …. but it may not.

Perhaps reflexiveness is the major benefit of micro-blogging (at least as it exists at the moment), so maybe I should just be measuring constructs more indicative of general well-being (eg self-esteem, hopefulness). Alternatively, if I want to focus on behavioural change, I could look at self-efficacy. Again, self-esteem and hopefulness may help in the interpretation of the data.

In summary, I have to choose whether I’m focusing on social support, which may have a more general application, or self-efficacy, which will the contribution to aid in the field of behavioural change. In either case measures of self-esteem and hopefulness will also be useful indicators. (Aside: increases in perceived social support would be reflected in these two variables, so the effect of social support would not be abandoned entirely if we focus on self-efficacy at the expense of perceived social support).

Since the affordances of micro-blogging in its current form do not have interaction as a focus, perhaps self-efficacy is in fact the construct I should be looking at. Reflexiveness is, after all, important in behavioural change and I’m not sure how it is relevant for other forms of social support. Maybe it’s only relevant when there is some kind of goal-driven journey. (Aside: Preece refers to tasks and goals in her analysis of the online knee reconstruction support network).
Yes, I know things got a bit hairy back there. But I think I’ve sorted it all out now (for the moment…). Looks like I’ll probably be changing my research question to:

What influence does micro-blogging have over self-efficacy in smoking cessation?

Next up: defining micro blogging. At the moment it’s just floating in the air – I really need to ground it in the literature.

What is research?

I suppose I should have thought about this question before I started undertaking a thesis. I’ve been really struggling the last couple of days and have finally realised why. My main motivation for action is to solve problems. While it may be possible to solve a problem while undertaking research, there is the added requirement of making some kind of contribution to knowledge. Up until this point I’ve been solving problems based on what I’ve read from the literature, but I’ve rarely gone beyond this to think what these solutions may be adding to knowledge.

It’s time to start looking at what contribution to knowledge my solution is making, that is, in what ways it is innovative. My current concept, which involves integrating ’status blogging’ services like twitter with an online social support network may not really innovative in a technical sense. Services like twitter wear their APIs on their sleeves, this is exactly the kind of thing they expect you to do. However, various insights could be gained from this research to contribute to a number of fields. Some random thoughts:

• How should interfaces be designed to encourage support of people sending their status to online support networks?
• Is the opportunity to self-reflect a motivator for the reciprocation of social support in online social networks? If so, are people more likely to give support in discussion threads (compared to the twitter-based solution) where they have more opportunity to self-reflect?
• What effect does group size have on the reciprocation of social support?

As is finally becoming clear, you can spin something however you like. I’ve had my moments over the last couple of days when it’s seemed like considering reciprocity in this situation is a bit arbitrary. I feel like this is the ill-advised desire for the ‘right’ answer rearing its head again. In research, I feel like perhaps things don’t ‘click’ into place quite as often, or at least the clicking takes so much time that you don’t even realise it’s happening. While I realise that delving into the world of research is something that I need to do, part of me just wants to smack down some serious interface designs and get stuff happening. Patience and focus are the order of the day…

So, I’m still feeling a bit lost and I have to have a decision for my supervisors this afternoon. But that’s ok, I feel like somehow this is a reasonably normal process to be going through, especially when moving from the ’solution-based’ mindset of computer science (my undergraduate degree) to the ‘contribution-based’ mindset of scholarly research.

Gotta get this straight…

Whoa. I have read way too many articles today.

I’m about to try to sort out this whole reciprocity issue. The way it is at the moment, it would be pretty straightforward for me to design a solution taking into account everything I’ve read about reciprocity, which would mean completing option 1 from my previous post. Before I decide on doing that, though, I’d like to see if there’s an opportunity for me to make any contribution to reciprocation literature (option 2 from my previous post). I’ve got a few leads, but I keep procrastinating when it comes time to try to focus. Reminds me of meditation.

At least now I know I’ve got option 1 as a safety net. I’m a bit concerned that I don’t seem to have one paper in my collection that spells it out, though.

Anyway, this is the last bit of procrastination before I dive in. Here goes nothing….

Thesis topic crunch time: theoretical indigestion

The context

A couple of weeks ago my research question looked something like this:

How can existing online social networks be used to assist in behavioural change?

The context for my investigation is smoking cessation. So far I’ve been focusing on how online social networks are being used for social support. I’ve found that some substantial research has been done into social support online (Maloney-Krichmar & Preece 2005), but little has focused on extending this support to pervasive technologies such as mobile phones. Some studies in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – which is where my thesis is supposed to be placed – have investigated text message support services for behavioural change, while others have looked at social support in particular using mobile applications (Consolvo et al. 2006). A study by my supervisors (Graham et al 2006) found that temporality, placedness and reflexivity were important factors to consider when designing technologies to aid behavioural change.

To my knowledge, none of the existing online social support networks are addressing the concepts of temporality and placedness (context awareness). All of them allow interaction only through the website – unless you are fortunate enough to have the internet on your mobile phone, you can’t access support when and where you need it. So I started thinking about how peers in a social network could start to address these temporality and placedness issues – delivering emotional or even informational support when the concerned individual needs it, with an awareness of the person’s context. This is not to say that the technology does not exist, only that it is not yet being effectively employed towards the end of social support.

Web 2.0 services like twitter and facebook allow users to post their status from their mobile phone while they are on the go. A quitting smoker could post their status (having a good/bad day, in need of help etc) to the online group, which could observe the stream of messages coming from community members. Members that are online could reply, sending messages of support. There are a whole host of other ways to exploit this technology in this context (eg buddies, subscribing to users’ feeds) but for the moment I’m trying to keep my focus small, lest my imagination run away with me. The concept underlying all this has something to do with reciprocity, either between individuals or between the individual and the group.

Theoretical indigestion

The idea of reciprocity between an individual and the network came to me while reading Barry Wellman’s Network capital in a multi-level world (2001). The paper is a multi-level analysis of social support. It is multi-level in the sense that it looks at the individual, relational and network characteristics of a social support network, and tries to observe any emergent network properties, instances where the ‘whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts’. Although the paper was more a demonstration of the technique of multi-level analysis, some interesting conclusions were drawn on the nature of social support:

• Reciprocity is a multi-level phenomenon. Small acts are likely to be reciprocated quickly by the receiver of support, whereas more substantial support may be reciprocated at some point by some other part of the network. A family is a good example of this latter form of reciprocal support.
• Particular kinds of relational ties are more likely to be supportive when embedded in a network of similar ties. These are cases where network capital is generated:
  • Less intimate but active relational ties between individuals were more likely to be supportive in a network with more active ties
  • Ties with high accessibility (eg ease, frequency of contact) were more likely to provide support when embedded in a network of accessible ties.

I have the feeling that both of these observations will be useful to me at some point, but for the moment I’ll try to focus on reciprocity. When interpreting Wellman’s conclusions, it is important to keep in mind that the data it draws from is based on very broad definitions of emergency support and everyday support, and that the sample was from a middle-class British-Canadian population in a Toronto suburb in 1968. Is the emotional support needed by a quitting smoker emergency or everyday support? Could patterns of reciprocity have changed since 1968?

The next step

So perhaps now it is time for me to find a theory of reciprocity (or some other related concept) and see if it is evident in online social support networks. If a theory already exists for technology-assisted reciprocity, then this will be used, otherwise a theory of face to face reciprocity will be employed.

Once the theory has been selected, I have two choices (as suggested by my supervisors):

Option 1: Contribution to user interface literature

In this option I would look at the theory and see how web 2.0 techniques could be used to employ the theory. My empirical component would then be a laboratory study comparing a ’standard’ web 2.0 technology, such as twitter, with a solution which I would develop. While part of me would like to develop something like this, I have my reservations

Pessimisms

• A laboratory setting may not reflect the usability issues that would become apparent in the real world
• I may not be able to develop a solution in time
• Unreliability of the technology. Facebook does not allow text messaging from Australia and Twitter has currently disabled text messaging from Australia. (This may not be a problem – in a lab environment we could just use IM to simulate messages)
• The contribution to UI literature may not be all that significant. People are churning out web2.0 interface designs.

Optimisms

• Output may actually be significant – ‘designing for reciprocity in online social support networks’. Output would be what works and doesn’t work in the UI design.
• I would get to do some development, have a product at the end
• Designing – may be easier to tap into some kind of ‘flow’

Questions

• Would there have to be a couple of different prototype designs to compare?

Option 2: Contribution to reciprocity literature

In this option I would look at the theory and do some empirical study of existing online social support networks. For example, I might look at a number of posts over a period of a week and observe reciprocation between community members. I could then see if the theory was verified or whether it needs to be extended to account for the observed behaviour.

Pessimisms

• This may only be useful if no study has already been done into reciprocation in online support communities (suppose I better find out, huh?)
• I won’t get any technical experience with the new technology. This may effect my employment options after graduation

Optimisms

• Providing it hasn’t already been done, this would be a meaningful contribution

Questions

• Would I still design a prototype GUI?

Where is smoking cessation in all this?

It seems like the context of smoking cessation may be becoming irrelevant in all this. My intuitive assumption that smokers will need more immediate support than members of other social support groups (eg depression, injury recovery) may actually be incorrect. If it is incorrect, then we could use any context. If I do go ahead and use the smoking cessation context, I will have to justify my reason for doing so, citing reasons other than the fact that there is research being done in this context in my department. Alternatively, I may be able to argue that temporality and placedness are in fact more important for smoking cessation in particular, since the consequences of missing support (ie. a relapse) are more severe than in other contexts.

Do you care?

I honestly don’t think anything I’ve written today will be useful (or comprehensible) to anyone other than myself, but I certainly do feel a lot less confused for having written it. Hopefully once my theory and methods are locked down I can start writing posts that are more useful to more people