… 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.
