Fair, Equitable, and Just: A Socio-technical Approach to Online Safety

Socio-technical systems have been revolutionary in reshaping how people maintain relationships, learn about new opportunities, engage in meaningful discourse, and even express grief and frustrations. At the same time, these systems have been central in the proliferation of harmful behaviors online as internet users are confronted with serious and pervasive threats at alarming rates. Although researchers and companies have attempted to develop tools to mitigate threats, the perception of dominant (often Western) frameworks as the standard for the implementation of safety mechanisms fails to account for imbalances, inequalities, and injustices in non-Western civilizations like the Caribbean. Therefore, in this dissertation I adopt a holistic approach to online safety that acknowledges the complexities of harms for understudied populations specifically focusing on the Caribbean. In this dissertation, I conduct three studies that take steps towards (1) filling in the gap of missing empirical understanding around users’ perceptions of safety threats and how that is associated with their intentions to engage with supportive countermeasures, (2) understanding the gaps in current approaches to justice, and (3) developing an understanding towards the development of equitable and inclusive countermeasures. In the first study, I conduct a region-wide survey which reveals Caribbean citizens experience high rates of exposure to online threats. Moreover, I show that by conceptually defining protective behaviors based on the threats that they address, it exposes how the perceptions of threats influences the adoption of online safety countermeasures while uncovering distinctions in perceptions depending on the type of harm. The second study utilizes a multi-disciplinary approach to understand the state of legislative protections. Through a reflective legislative and media analysis, the study uncovered major discrepancies in the region’s approach towards justice in online spaces. Lastly, the final study incorporates the findings of these works by conducting an online experiment to test the design of justice-oriented safety countermeasures. The results provide support for the development of countermeasures that people perceive to be fair, equitable, and just

Purchasing through Social Platforms with Buy Buttons: Academic and Practical Considerations

Social commerce sales are considerably increasing in recent years. Social platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat) play a strategic role in world economy. However, social platforms ran into several burning issues: low ad conversion rates, social platform users’ free-riding behaviors, etc. Although buy buttons, a clickable navigation element leading users from a social platform to an e-commerce platform, could be a solution for such issues, the outcomes of using buy buttons did not reach many professionals’ expectation. This thesis studied four issues related to social shopping with buy buttons. First, as it is undetermined whether a social platform should roll out the buy-button feature or not, it is necessary to study whether the presence of buy button is associated with better outcomes (e.g. users’ higher willingness to purchase through the social platform) or not. Second, as social commerce is a remote shopping mode in which buyers and sellers cannot have face-to-face interactions, high risk and low trust could be two crucial barriers of social commerce. Hence, it is needed to study how risk- and trust-related factors influence users’ direct purchasing behavior. Third, considering that social commerce could be risky, this thesis wants to examine whether the presence of safe shopping measures (vs. an unsafe shopping scenario) can improve the performance of social shopping or not. Finally, social commerce involves a purchase path from a social platform to an e-commerce platform. There are many pain points (e.g., re-entering billing and shipping information) in the purchase path. Meanwhile, as social shopping risks and pain points in the purchase path could be caused by a same factor, the silos between social platforms and e-commerce platforms. It is interesting to study how safe shopping measures and integrated path-to-purchase (users can complete a purchase without leaving the social platform; vs. separated path-to-purchase in which users have to leave the social platform and go to the e-commerce platform to complete a purchase) jointly influence users. In order to answer these questions, three essays have been included in this thesis. Several online surveys were conducted. The between-subjects experimental design and the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique were used. The results showed that the presence of buy button was related to better outcomes. It found that risk- and trust-related factors significantly influenced users’ direct purchasing behavior. Both the safe shopping measures and the integrated path-to-purchase design can generate better outcomes of using a buy button in social shopping. In most circumstances, users showed more positive reactions when the safe shopping measures or the integrated path-to-purchase was present. However, no significant interaction effects between the safe shopping measures (vs. an unsafe shopping scenario) and the integrated path-to-purchase (vs. the separated path-to-purchase) were found. The theoretical contributions have been discussed in contrast to previous literature. This thesis has added academic value by offering new insights for previously established variable relationships in a different research context and studying variable relationships that have not been examined in previously relevant studies. From a practical viewpoint, as buy buttons inject e-commerce capabilities into social platforms, this thesis implies that socially focused platforms could reap benefits from social commerce by rolling out a buy-button feature. It is recommended that social platforms wanting to roll out buy buttons take safe shopping measures and create a seamless shopping experience for users.Tesis Univ. Granada.China Scholarship Council grant number: 201606170055National Natural Science Foundation of China grant number: 7170206

Playing it safe : A literature review and research agenda on motivational technologies in transportation safety

While motivation affects safety-related decision-making and human reliability, technologies to promote it are scarcely used. We have only recently witnessed how motivational technologies, including serious games, gamification, and persuasive technologies have emerged on the palette of methods for enhancing transportation safety. However, the research on these technologies for transportation safety is fragmented, preventing future studies and practical efforts. This paper describes the state-of-the-art through a systematic review to address this issue. Analyzing 62 studies, we perceive that motivational technologies focus on reducing the accident likelihood and mitigating their consequences. While these technologies can induce positive psychological change and improve learning, the evidence of behavioral change is mainly limited to simulation settings, lacking examination of the long-term benefits and potential adverse effects. Our results highlight the importance of aligning motivational design with the cognitive demand of the transportation task and the means for improving safety. Future research should explore how motivational technologies can enhance safety from the system design perspective, cover a broader scope of transportation modes, compare their effects to conventional approaches while considering social aspects in their design and evaluation. Beside providing an overview of the area and future directions, this paper also introduces design recommendations to guide practitioners.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Exploring, understanding, then designing: twitter users’ sharing behavior for minor safety incidents

Social media has become an integral part of human lives. Social media users resort to these platforms for various reasons. Users of these platforms spend a lot of time creating, reading, and sharing content, therefore, providing a wealth of available information for everyone to use. The research community has taken advantage of this and produced many publications that allow us to better understand human behavior. An important subject that is sometimes discussed and shared on social media is public safety. In the past, Twitter users have used the platform to share incidents, share information about incidents, victims and perpetrators, and used it to provide help in distressed locations after an attack or after a natural disaster. Public safety officials also used Twitter to disseminate information to maintain and improve safety and seek information from the crowds. The previous focus of the research is mainly on significant public safety incidents; but, incidents with less severity matter too. The focus of this dissertation is on minor incidents and the aim is to understand what motivates social media users to share those incidents to maintain and increase public safety through design suggestions.This dissertation is comprised of three completed studies. The first study attempts to understand motivations to share public safety incidents on social media under the collective action theory lens. Collective action theory assumes that rational people will not participate in a public good unless there is a special incentive or an external motivation for them. In this study, public safety is considered as the public good. This study tests people’s willingness to share incidents on social media if: the victim is someone they know, if the location of the incident is close, and if there is some coercion to influence users willingness to share. General support is found for the hypotheses and collective action theory.In the second study, the focus is on internal motivations that stem from being prosocial. An established scale that measures six different traits of prosocial behavior is used. It is hypothesizes that prosocial behavior is positively related to decisions to share incidents on social media. The study also tests other mediating variables, namely: following news outlets on Twitter, following public safety officials on social media, frequency of tweeting/retweeting. Partial support for prosocial tendencies effect on decisions to share is found. The study also discoveres that the three mediating variables (number of public safety official accounts followed, news exposure on social media, and tweet/retweet frequency) fully mediates the relationship and that they have a significant positive effect on decisions to share. The third and final study complements the previous two and helps conclude the previous findings. A 2X2X2 online experiment design is conducted. The three manipulations are the availability of location information, platform authority availability, and availability of sender authority. The study hypothesizes that the three interventions will produce a significant positive relationship with decisions to share on Twitter. It is found that location information has no effect on sharing minor incidents on Twitter, however, participants are more likely to use a fictitious button that increases local exposure to minor public safety tweets. It is also found that the authority of the sender has a significant effect on decisions to share. On the other hand, platform authority does not show an effect on decisions to share public safety incidents on Twitter

A Decade Review of Disease Surveillance Research Trends in the International Journal of Health Geographics (2009 to 2018)

The field of health geographics is rapidly growing in its methods and epistemologies. This is a review of the open-source journal International Journal of Health Geographics, and the trends in disease surveillance over ten years (2009-2018). Drawing from research review methodologies, we wrote a Python script to quantify research trends within the field of geographic disease surveillance, finding many articles focusing on population health, techniques of GIS, qualitative techniques, and geospatial technology for health monitoring. This was foundational in conducting an in-depth qualitative lexical analysis of article content and epistemologies. Overall, we concluded that over the time period, the Journal has become progressively more epistemologically nuanced through innovative geospatial methodologies. We believe that the inclusion of broader ontologies of sex, gender, race, and obesity could and should eventually be accommodated by ongoing increased rigor in geographic health methodologies and data collection practices

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

BIG DATA APPLICATIONS AND CHALLENGES IN GISCIENCE (CASE STUDIES: NATURAL DISASTER AND PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS MANAGEMENT)

This dissertation examines the application and significance of user-generated big data in Geographic Information Science (GIScience), with a focus on managing natural disasters and public health crises. It explores the role of social media data in understanding human-environment interactions and in informing disaster management and public health strategies. A scalable computational framework will be developed to model extensive unstructured geotagged data from social media, facilitating systematic spatiotemporal data analysis.The research investigates how individuals and communities respond to high-impact events like natural disasters and public health emergencies, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. In particular, it assesses the impact of socio-economic-demographic characteristics and the digital divide on social media engagement during such crises. In addressing the opioid crisis, the dissertation delves into the spatial dynamics of opioid overdose deaths, utilizing Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression to discern local versus broader-scale determinants. This analysis foregrounds the necessity for targeted public health responses and the importance of localized data in crafting effective interventions, especially within communities that are ethnically diverse and economically disparate. Using Hurricane Irma as a case study, this dissertation analyzes social media activity in Florida in September 2017, leveraging Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression to explore spatial variations in social media discourse, its correlation with damage severity, and the disproportionate impact on racialized communities. It integrates social media data analysis with political-ecological perspectives and spatial analytical techniques to reveal structural inequalities and political power differentials. The dissertation also tackles the dissemination of false information during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining Twitter activity in the United States from April to July 2020. It identifies misinformation patterns, their origins, and their association with the pandemic\u27s incidence rates. Discourse analysis pinpoints tweets that downplay the pandemic\u27s severity or spread disinformation, while spatial modeling investigates the relationship between social media discourse and disease spread. By concentrating on the experiences of racialized communities, this research aims to highlight and address the environmental and social injustices they face. It contributes empirical and methodological insights into effective policy formulation, with an emphasis on equitable responses to public health emergencies and natural disasters. This dissertation not only provides a nuanced understanding of crisis responses but also advances GIScience research by incorporating social media data into both traditional and critical analytical frameworks