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

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