Day 2 Blog “Adjusting”

Day 2: Adjusting 

Today was a very overwhelming, yet fun day. My body is still trying to adjust to the time zone change from Pacific to eastern time, so it was quite difficult to be very attentive but I powered through it.  Today we were visited by Andrew Neel who had a presentation on IRB and ethics, which was finally something I felt confident about in terms of course material. We discussed the three different stages of IRB approval and want over things like the Belmont report and the Tuskegee syphilis study. Later that day we went over Share LaTex which is typesetting used a lot in academia. I was familiar with the software but hardly ever had a use for it, since everyone at my university used a basic word processor. One of our homework assignments required us to make a bio in sharelatex using sections, references, tables, and images (here). Making the table was quite weird to use but I still need to work on getting the references done correctly, as I ran into trouble showing them in the document.   In the future, I don’t see a reason where I would ever go back to using a basic word processor.

Our next topic of the day was paper circuits! This was a very fun experience learning how to solder using copper wire tape and LEDs. It took me quite awhile to grasp the concept, but Ben Jelen was very helpful in teaching me how to manipulate the solder.

Our next presenter was Tom, who went over the proper protocols for the handling of data storage using iu.box. He went into great detail in how to navigate the interface, and assign roles to people collaborating on the project, and ways to ensure that data will remain secure when people leave the university.

Our next presenter was from Professor Siek, who went over different ways of observing people such as Organic observations, temporal mapping, spatiotemporal mapping and object mapping. My favorite observation was object- mapping. It was very easy for me to track objects as I was constantly getting distracted by everything happening in the background, but tracking an object was a lot easier for me.

For our observational homework, we had to observe people at a bus stop or restaurant to observe smartphone usage and patterns. I decided to observe people at Brown Gyros on 4th street. I observed that when patrons were inside or outside they routinely had their phones in hand when ordering, sitting down and waiting for their food. At times people would often take their phones out only to put them away, or there would be a snowball effect where one person took out their device which in turn lead to everyone taking out their phones at the table or outside the establishment. I believe that this particular observation method would not require full IRB board, but would possibly require an expedited review since it would require at least consent forms if you were recording individuals, however, if u were not recording and were merely observing this may be exempt.

Article Summaries

For today we had to read an article written by Haley MacLeod, Ben Jelen, Annu Prabhakar, Lora Oehlberg, Katie Siek, and Kay Connelly. (2016). Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) for Researching Distributed Populations. In the Proceedings of the Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth 2016). (Acceptance: 35%). To summarize, this article aimed to look at ways to look at remote or distributed populations when conducting group research. Researcher in the article created a facebook to collect data on patients with rare diseases, to test their goal of conducting only group studies from underserved populations and aimed to improve their sample size(Power analysis). In this article  13 participants were added to a private facebook group over the course of 22 weeks with 11 activities given to the group of participants. The participants were given a 50$ honorarium for taking part in the study.  The limitations of the study were that during the study researchers ran into problems trying to compile the entirety of the data collected from Facebook. Despite having to manually code information they found meaningful insights into how participants found higher engagement on tasks that were done over a period of time. In the end, the paper found for future considerations they could compare in-person studies with the ARC community, and applying the methods from this study to other populations than remote ones.

 

J. F., MacLeod, H., Connelly, C. L., Dunbar, J. C., Beck, J., Siek, K. A., & Shih, P. C. (2018, April). Defining through expansion: Conducting asynchronous remote communities (ARC) research with stigmatized groups. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 557). ACM.  In this second article, researchers looked at to use the Asynchronous Remote Communities(ARC) method with stigmatized groups of individuals. The study demographics included 18 participants (11 men and 7 women, 1 queer) from the LGBTQ community. Age demographics were from 18 to 16 years of age, with the average age of participants living with HIV spanned from 1 to 30 years. Participants were also given a 50$ compensation for participating in the study.  TThe methodology of this study used Facebook to qualitatively analyze participants that were recruited into a private Facebook group and comments and engaged in support groups. In this study researchers found that individuals participating found more engagement and investment in the outcomes of the study. They also concluded that participants found another avenue of support system through this ARC method, with many continuing to use the private facebook group to communicate