Meeting Summary

Firstly, answers to some questions:

Should I set up their twitter accounts for them? 

I should offer that I can do this for them. If I set up an account, I will need to use a new email address to do it. I will need to make sure that the participant enters their own email address at the start of the study – in case they want to be sent email reminders or forget their password. They may also want to change the password.

Should I maintain full access to the accounts?

I was thinking that maybe I should be able to have access to their accounts so that I can see the private messages they have sent to each other. My supervisors suggested that I should keep them private and ask them to disclose as much about their private messages as they are comfortable with. This might be as little as stating how often they sent private messages, or as much as cutting and pasting messages they are comfortable with me seeing.

How can I ‘refine my data collection approach’?

Steve suggested that I try to collect some dummy data and start to figure out how I may approach the analysis. This should hopefully streamline my approach ahead of getting the real data and help me to write up my methodology more clearly.

Deadlines

I now have a fortnight to produce a rough draft of my literature review. For some reason I’ve had it in the back of my head that this will be pretty easy, but I think I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The literature review needs to be a well crafted story.

Background & Context: Introduce the problem space

Problem: A problem that has been identified as important by the relevant academic communities – could be the temporality aspect for smoking cessation. Provides the scope for the ‘work of others’ literature review.

Work of Others: What others in the research community have done to address the problem

Gap: Shortcomings of the work of others in addressing the problem. Note that there is some interplay between the gap and the problem. Some things may be interchangeable between the two depending on the story to be told

Research Question: A re-articulation of the gap as a question

Temporal Aspects of Usability

I know, I know, it seems like the topic has changed every week. But this one is sticking for sure. It’s simply too late to change now.

Basically, I’m going to be exploring the ways that micro-blogging can help improve the timeliness of support for quitting smokers in online communities. I will be guided in my investigation by Fabre et al.’s (2000) theory of the dimensions of the Temporal Aspects of usability: duration, location, frequency and contingency.

I will conduct a trial that will involve the participants using twitter for a fortnight. Participants will be groups of 3 or 4 that have had some interaction with each other within the QuitNet online community. Through observing their feeds, I will be able to see the frequency and context of posts between the participants as the use twitter to assist them in quitting smoking.

References

Fabre, J. (2000). Designing time at the user interface. Behaviour & Information Technology, 19(6), 451-463.