Access Grid Nodes in Field Research

This article reports fieldwork with an Access Grid Node ('AGN') device, analogous to video teleconferencing but based on grid computational technology. The device enables research respondents to be interviewed at remote sites, with potential savings in travelling to conduct fieldwork. Practical, methodological and analytic aspects of the experimental fieldwork are reported. Findings include some distinctive features of AGN interviews relative to co-present interviews; overall, there were some benefits and some disadvantages to communication. The article concludes that this new research interview mode shows potential, particularly once the difficulties associated with a new research technology are resolved.Social Research Methods, Interview Methods, New Technologies for Social Research, Access Grid Nodes, Interview Communication, Witnesses at Court

Forming Impressions on Computer-Mediated Healthcare Peer-Support Systems for Informal Caregivers

The rapid evolution of Information technology (IT) has seen its adoption during many aspects of our lives, including healthcare. Healthcare IT provides the public with access to governmental records, electronic health records, healthcare websites, internet-based medical consultation, and more recently, online peer-support portals. These peer-support portals, which are directed not only towards patients but also caregivers, have been found to be a source of informational and emotional support. In addition, for caregivers who cannot leave their loved ones to access in-person support groups, these online support portals are an important substitute. In these online peer-support portals, informal caregivers interact with one another, providing emotional and personal support, leading to a sense of camaraderie and thereby a social relationship. The contributions on these portals are voluntary, with some members contributing more often than others. The first study in this dissertation focuses on understanding the patterns of interaction between these top contributors, referred to here as peer patrons, and other informal caregivers in terms of the information they provide, and the unique characteristics of the top contributors based on these interactions. Several unique interaction patterns related to peer patrons were found along with information about how peer patrons contribute towards the coping mechanism of informal caregivers. Interface design implications based on these outcomes were discussed. With informal caregivers exchanging not only information and emotional content on online peer-support portals but also forming social relations, it is important to understand how these users form impressions of others based on the information they access. The possible consequences of following healthcare and medical advice posted on these portals further emphasize the need to understand how users form impressions of one another on these portals. The second study in this dissertation focuses on impression formation using profiles based on those of the peer patrons who were the focus of the previous study. This exploratory study brought to light the prominence of the comment content and the profile picture in forming impressions on these portals, thereby supporting literature regarding context effects on impression formation. The final chapter is an intervention-based study investigating factors leading to positive impression formation on online healthcare peer-support portals. It supported the findings from the previous study regarding the importance of comment and profile picture and suggested the use of other peer ratings to solidify impressions formed using the former two cues. Additionally, the contribution of this dissertation to the literature and the improvement of online healthcare peer-support portals is discussed

Essays on Individuals’ Information Assessment, Information Disclosure, Participation, and Response Behaviors in Online Health Communities

The emergence of online health communities (OHCs) has enabled the use of information technologies to address some social and health needs including but not limited to emotional, social, and health-related issues. This information age has encouraged user generated (UG) content, which facilitates both peer-to-peer and business-to-peer interconnections. This rich and active information epoch (i.e., OHCs) is distinct in that value is generated when peers or participants—who may be content generators and/or content consumers—interact together by exchanging information and receiving supports aimed at addressing their specific needs; and this is made possible through the online platforms or support groups acting as the intermediary among users. In this dissertation, I explore the dynamics that take place in OHCs by answering varied sets of questions and addressing and stretching different scholarly discourses including individuals’ information assessment, information disclosure, participation, and response behaviors in OHCs from a variety of theoretical perspectives including disclosure decision-making model and social presence theory, using diverse methodologies such as text analytics, two-stage least squares regression technique, decision trees analysis, and vector autoregression models in the OHC context. The overarching research question is: How does assessment of information and receiver influence patients’ disclosure ability and what user information disclosure mechanisms elicit effective support behaviors in online health communities? Patients with different disease types visit OHCs to get support and this support is made possible because patients participate by interacting with peers and providing responses to each other’s discussion. Support behaviors, especially in the OHC context, is a concept that covers facets such as, provision of response; interactivity or participation in discussions; relationship management; and offering helpful, appropriate, and relevant feedback responses to meet specific information, social, or emotional needs (Huang et al., 2019; Nambisan et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2019). By exploring the research question and with the unique features that these OHC platforms exhibit—the sharing of information, participation, and receiving of supports—these essays make the following contributions. Theoretically, the findings reveal that a patient’s disease type, the sensitivity of information being disclosed, and patient’s expectation of a response show unique effects on disclosure efficacy. These factors constitute mechanisms by which patients in OHCs are motivated to disclose health information in granular forms that elicit effective community responses and feedback. This information exchange mechanisms thereby, facilitate active community participation through giving or receiving of support, and thus, fostering a dynamic interplay between individuals’ disclosure and response behaviors in the online context. Practically, online health community managers can design their platforms to provide automated and customizable tools that improve patients’ information density and information breadth skills for effective response generation; and from the results, platform management can better understand users that are motivated to participate through giving, thereby encouraging those that are weak in receiving. Also, platform managers can improve the skills of those who are weak in giving for users that are motivated to participate through receiving. Essay 1: Promoting Participants’ Information Disclosure and Response Behaviors in Online Health Communities: Disclosure Decision-Making Model Perspective In this first essay, I extend the literature on information disclosure and the disclosure decision-making model (DD-MM) by examining the factors that influence information disclosure (disclosure efficacy) and the effects of disclosure efficacy on the response users receive (response efficacy) at the granular level. Until now, both concepts—disclosure efficacy and response efficacy have been conceptualized as single constructs. This current study breaks new grounds and broaden the DD-MM model by postulating that the subconstructs have different antecedents and consequences. By examining the relationships between the subconstructs of information assessment, disclosure efficacy, and response efficacy using the two-stage least squares regression method, the results reveal some insightful dynamics, otherwise not possible with unidimensional constructs. Essay 2: Investigation of non-linear effects of first impression cues on participation in online health communities: A decision tree induction theory development approach One notable phenomenon that prior literature has extensively explored in OHC platforms is user participation, which is a necessary condition for platform sustainment and value generation. Extant research has studied user participation as a form of giving, that is, how much users participate in online platforms by generating content (e.g., posting messages, replying to messages, or posting pictures).However, participation in OHC platforms can also take the form of receiving (the consumption for content that has been generated – e.g., reading other’s posts, gaining knowledge and support), and this has witnessed little attention in prior research. This third study argues that the giving and receiving participation is a reaction to user initial participation. In this second essay, based on social presence theory (SPT), I use decision tree analysis to interrogate the effect of first impression in the initial posts on users’ giving and receiving participation. The findings provide meaningful insights for advancing research and for assisting platform managers on what to focus on to encourage users’ giving or receiving participation on their platforms. Essay 3: User Two-way Communication Efficacy Behaviors in Online Health Communities: A Longitudinal Study In this second essay, I crack into some unsupported relationships between disclosure efficacy and response efficacy shown in the previous study, which could be due to the use of cross-sectional data in the analysis, giving nonsignificant findings. Over time, it is possible that the effectiveness of the response that disclosers receive could determine whether users will further disclose or not. For example, if a discloser does not receive valuable response that addresses his or her needs, he or she may stop posting or disclosing information on the platform, thus, leading to lurking behaviors or less recommendations for others to join the online platform. This current study proposes a two-way relationship between disclosure efficacy and response efficacy of users’ interactions in online health communities instead of looking at only the one-way relationship from disclosure efficacy to response efficacy (which showed some insignificant results). From an econometric perspective, time has been shown to play a dynamic role on variables and their relationships. Thus, this current paper uses dynamic vector autoregression (VAR) modeling technique with a longitudinal data set to investigate the one-way and two-way relationships between disclosure efficacy and response efficacy and their dimensions (information density and information breadth) and (information persuasiveness and response persuasiveness), respectively. The analysis reveals a recursive relationship between disclosure efficacy and response efficacy and some of their dimensions. This is a departure from some prior literature that proposed a static linear order in end-user information consumption. The significance of the nonlinear recursive relationship is marked extension of the DD-MM model by establishing the reenforcing effect of its key variables

What encourages student participation in online discussions

Distance learning began as a means of catering to students who needed to learn in isolated, individual learning environments but, more recently, has been evolving to offer an interactive and collaborative learning environment supported by Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). However, research has found that not all online discussions are productive for learning and that simply making discussions boards accessible to students does not achieve the interactive and collaborative experience for which they are promoted. One of the first requirements needed for successful online discussions is student participation. This study sought to identify what encourages student participation in online discussions. Motivation and social presence were investigated in this study because they have been identified as two concepts that assist in the encouragement of student participation. Motivation assists participation because it is the process whereby goal-directed activity is both instigated and sustained, and social presence because it has been found to increase interaction. This study sought information regarding what motivated or demotivated student participation in online discussions and what Social Presence behaviours students found most important for maintaining their desire to participate in online discussions. It also investigated relationships among, and changes in, student state motivation, student sense of social presence and student perceived sources of motivation and demotivation across the course of a semester. Finally, students' opinion about their motivation, sense of social presence and reasons for participation were investigated through open-ended questions. A Sequential Exploratory design was used to first obtain breadth of data (quantitative) through online surveys (n equals 60 participants). This included a test/retest design. Depth of the data (qualitative) was then explored through interviews that were based on the results of the quantitative data analysis (n equals 14 participants). The main findings of this study were that students' sense of social presence changed significantly across the course of the semester and this change was a decrease in sense of social presence for 50 percent of the students. Context and Social factors were mentioned more frequently as both motivators and demotivators for participation than Structure/format factors. Correlations revealed a significant relationship between state motivation and social presence. Finally, open-ended questions generated a number of major themes that help to promote participation. All of these findings have implications for teachers and designers of online courses. They show that many factors influence student participation and that some of these factors may change over the course of a semester. Teachers and designers should use this information when designing and implementing courses to not only initiate student participation, but also to maintain participation throughout the course

Why do people share online? Online disinhibition effect in the context of the virtual community of Reddit

For the past two decades, the growth of Internet has been truly exponential. Although there is nothing deterministic about the effects of this technological revolution, it is evident that the Internet is changing our behavior in fundamental ways. One recent expression of the Internet culture is the website reddit.com, which describes itself as "the front page of Internet". In their personal stories the users of Reddit share everything from their financial problems to their illegal venture. And to every touching story about struggling with depression there is a startlingly rude joke about the said depression. What motivates people to share their stories in Reddit even though not necessarily a single user will remember their username? One of the biggest influencers on how we behave online is the online disinhibition effect. To unerstand the site and its communications in a fundamental way, I decided to study the online disinhibition effect in the virtual community of Reddit through netnography. For a period of one year, I participated in the community, aiming to document the experiences of others and myself on the site. According to my research the characteristics typical to Reddit communications: anonymity, lack of cues, and text-basedness affect change the way we communicate on the site, compared to how we communicate face-to-face. When communicating on the site, redditors are able to dissociate themselves from their daily life and identity and assume instead communications' culture, values and morals associated with the virtual community of Reddit. Thus, online disinhibition effect in Reddit means not abandoning all norms but conforming to new ones. All of this is meaningful for the community members because disinhibited behavior gives redditors feelings of empowerment or perceived capabilities in coping with various challenges and overcoming obstacles. Online disinhibition can create empowering experiences through venting, finding similar others, and heightened feelings of self-efficacy as well as receiving emotional support. Thus, people behave disinhibitedly online to feel more powerful and capable. My research contributes to the field of consumer research, although I borrow concepts and ideas vastly from the fields of social psychology and communications studies. Through understanding the phenomena of online disinhibition better, I hope to contribute to the discourse on virtual communities and brand communitie

Using Virtual Worlds to Identify Multidimensional Student Engagement in High School Foreign Language Learning Classrooms

Virtual world environments have evolved from object-oriented, text-based online games to complex three-dimensional immersive social spaces where the lines between reality and computer-generated begin to blur. Educators use virtual worlds to create engaging three-dimensional learning spaces for students, but the impact of virtual worlds in comparison to the traditional face-to-face counterpart has been uncertain in terms of multidimensional student engagement. Research has a need to determine the impact of virtual worlds on student engagement in comparison to the traditional face-to-face environment. The study examined the effects of virtual world and face-to-face learning environments on high school foreign language students\u27 emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement, as well as combined engagement. A two-way MANOVA was used to determine the effect of traditional face-to-face and virtual world learning environments on combined student engagement. A 2 x 2 analysis of covariance was used to determine the effect of traditional face-to-face and virtual world learning environments on emotional student engagement. A 2 x 2 analysis of covariance was also used to determine the effect of traditional face-to-face and virtual world learning environments on cognitive student engagement. A t-test was used to determine the effect of traditional face-to-face and virtual world learning environments on behavioral engagement. The study did not find evidence of overall, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral engagement difference between the two learning environments. The findings indicate the virtual world environment is similar to the traditional face-to-face environment in terms of student engagement. School administrators and teachers can benefit from this research when determining effective means of creating highly engaging learning environments for students. Virtual worlds can be a medium for engaging learning opportunities for students in face-to-face and virtual schools. Additional research in this area is recommended to determine the impact of virtual worlds with different student populations and subject areas

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

You Belong Here: An \u27Interpellative\u27 Approach to Usability

Given the participatory, immersive Web 2.0 culture that characterizes digital experiences today, what is traditionally understood as \u27usability\u27 is insufficient to drive the engagement Web 2.0 audiences both crave and have come to expect from best-in-class interfaces. Thus, this dissertation presents a \u27constructivist\u27 vision of usability that helps designers \u27speak\u27 to audiences who demand excellence, and who will leave when confronted with mediocrity. The constructivist practice of usability occurs through what I call \u27interpellative design.\u27 Interpellative design is both a complement to, and a critique of, \u27accommodationist\u27 approaches to usability (Howard, 2010a) which tend to be associated with technical problem solving (Jordan, 2001), ease of use (Shedroff, 2001), and \u27expedient\u27 solutions (Katz, 1992) to mechanistic problems. As part of the under-theorized \u27constructivist\u27 approach to usability (Howard, 2010a), interpellative design allows usability to remain a \u27problem-solving discipline\u27 (Jordan, 2001); however, its focus on beauty, argument, and the figural dialogue between designers and users extends the purview of usability into non-algorithmic pursuits. To describe a constructivist approach to usability, I outline a theoretical taxonomy which identifies factors at play in interpellative user interfaces. An \u27interpellative interface\u27 is one which calls out or \u27hails\u27 (Althusser, 1971a) users and indicates that a given interface is a viable \u27place\u27 in which they can exert influence, accomplish tasks, or solve problems. The hail is facilitated through the construction of a habitus and use of social capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Briefly, a habitus is the space into which users are interpellated, and acts and artifacts of social capital are expressions of how they belong in that space. In examining how these factors manifest in digital interfaces, I argue that the constructivist approach to usability enacted through interpellative design enables usability engineers to identify flaws in interfaces that were not apparent before the mechanisms of habitus and social capital were explicated. The lens of interpellative design allows usability engineers to address the constructivist concerns pertaining to emotion, visual communication, and other types of \u27distinctions\u27 (Bourdieu, 1984) that could not be \u27seen\u27 before

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with