Consumption experiences in the research process

Data collection is often a laborious enterprise that forms part of the wider craft skill of doing research. In this essay, I try to understand whether parts of research processes in Human-Centred Computing (HCC) have been commodified, with a particular focus on data collection. If data collection has been commodified, do researchers act as producers or consumers in the process? And if researchers are consumers, has data collection become a consumption experience? If so, what are the implications of this? I explore these questions by considering the status of craft and consumption in the research process and by developing examples of consumption experiences. I note the benefits of commodity research artefacts, while highlighting the potentially deleterious effects consumption experiences could have on our ability to generate insights into the relations between people and technology. I finish the paper by relating consumption experiences to contemporary issues in HCC and lay out a programme of empirical work that would help answer some of the questions this paper raises

A qualitative study of senior hospital managers' views on current and innovative strategies to improve hand hygiene

Background Despite universal recognition of the importance of hand hygiene in reducing the incidence of healthcare associated infections, health care workers’ compliance with best practice has been sub-optimal. Senior hospital managers have responsibilities for implementing patient safety initiatives and are therefore ideally placed to provide suggestions for improving strategies to increase hand hygiene compliance. This is an under-researched area, accordingly the aim of this study was to identify senior hospital managers’ views on current and innovative strategies to improve hand hygiene compliance. Methods Qualitative design comprising face-to-face interviews with thirteen purposively sampled senior managers at a major teaching and referral hospital in Sydney, Australia. Data were analysed thematically. Results Seven themes emerged: culture change starts with leaders, refresh and renew the message, connect the five moments to the whole patient journey, actionable audit results, empower patients, reconceptualising non-compliance and start using the hammer. Conclusions To strengthen hand hygiene programmes, strategies based on the five moments of hand hygiene should be tailored to specific roles and settings and take into account the whole patient journey including patient interactions with clinical and non-clinical staff. Senior clinical and non-clinical leaders should visibly champion and mandate best practice initiatives and articulate that hand hygiene non-compliance is culturally and professionally unacceptable to the organization. Strategies that included a disciplinary component and which conceptualise hand hygiene non-compliance as a patient safety error may be worth evaluating in terms of staff acceptability and effectiveness

Crowdworkers' temporal flexibility is being traded for the convenience of requesters through 19 'invisible mechanisms' employed by crowdworking platforms

Crowdworking platforms are a prime example of a product that sells flexibility to its consumers. In this paper, we argue that crowdworking platforms sell temporal flexibility to requesters to the detriment of workers. We begin by identifying a list of 19 features employed by crowdworking platforms that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from crowdworkers to requesters. Using the list of features, we conduct a comparative analysis of nine crowdworking platforms available to U.S.-based workers, in which we describe key differences and similarities between the platforms. We find that crowdworking platforms strongly favour features that promote requesters’ temporal flexibility over workers’ by limiting the predictability of workers’ working hours and restricting paid time. Further, we identify which platforms employ the highest number of features that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from workers to requesters, consequently increasing workers’ temporal precarity. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the results

How to run an Errordiary Workshop: Exploring errors and resilience strategies with patients, professionals and the public

Errordiary is a public engagement initiative that aims to raise awareness and debate about error and resilience strategies. Errordiary in healthcare targeted patients, healthcare professionals and members of the public to see if it had potential for healthcare. To engage with these groups we ran a competition, surveys, focus groups and presentations. After a recent presentation about Errordiary one of the doctors that attended remarked, “I will be running a session on error and resilience strategies in my clinical practice, inspired by you!”. However, at that stage, it was not clear to us how to run such a session. In this paper we present a format that could be adapted by others. This format was successful in getting people with diabetes, healthcare professionals and the public to talk about and share their own errors and resilience strategies in three separate focus groups

Citizen scientists are not just quiz takers: information about project type influences data disclosure in online psychological surveys

Traditionally, citizen science has centred on giving lay people opportunities to learn about science by participating in it. Lately, psychological citizen science projects have increasingly aimed to attract participants by providing an opportunity for self-learning. Unfortunately, these citizen science projects sometimes resemble quizzes hosted by private companies that have been criticised for suboptimal privacy practices. We were interested in whether similarity to these dubious quizzes could jeopardise the ability of citizen science projects to collect sensitive personal data. We found that people who join an online quiz disclose a lower volume of sensitive data than those who join a citizen science project. Moreover, post-recruitment encouragement to learn about science influenced data disclosure among quiz takers but not among citizen scientists. These findings have implications not only for the effective design of citizen science but also for the broader debate about consent to disclose data in research, academic or otherwise

Dealing with digital service closure

People integrate digital services into their day-to-day lives, often with the assumption that they will always be available. What happens when these services close down? The introduction of services might be carefully planned, but their closure may not benefit from the same degree of consideration. A more developed understanding of the effects of closures might make it possible to minimize negative consequences for users. This paper builds on sustainability, digital memories, and collaborative-work research through an empirical investigation of service closure. Fifty-five participants completed a questionnaire that solicited experiences of service closure and attitudes toward prospective closure. Through a qualitative analysis of participant responses, we synthesized six themes that reflected the practical and emotional effects of service closure on people: disempowerment, disconnection, loss of capability, trust, time and effort, and notice periods. We make suggestions for ways that service features related to these themes might be managed during closure, but also identify less tractable challenges: as part of this investigation, we introduce and develop the concept of service patinas to describe the important but entirely service-bound data that contextualize digital artefacts

Establishing smoke-free homes in the Indigenous populations of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States: a systematic literature review

A smoke-free home can have multiple benefits by reducing exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS), supporting quit attempts among active smokers, and discouraging adolescents from taking up smoking. The aim of this review was to summarize the literature on the establishment of smoke-free homes in Indigenous populations and identify the supporting influences and barriers, using the Social Cognitive Theory lens. A search of the Medline, CINAHL, Cochrane Collaboration and PyscINFO databases and manual searches of relevant peer-reviewed literature was completed, focusing on Indigenous populations in developed economies of North America and Oceania. Of 2567 articles identified, 15 studies were included. Ten studies included Indigenous participants only, and of these just three focused entirely on SHS in the home. Knowledge of the harms associated with SHS was the most common theme represented in all the studies. This knowledge fueled parents' motivation to protect their children from SHS by establishing smoke-free homes. Individuals who approached implementation with confidence, coupled with clear communication about smoke-free home rules were more successful. Barriers included challenges for families with multiple smokers living in the same dwelling. There is limited research regarding managing smoking behaviors in the home among Indigenous populations, even though this approach is a successful catalyst for smoking prevention and cessation. Research to understand the influences that support the establishment of smoke-free homes is required for better-informed intervention studies

Exploring Citizen Psych-Science and the Motivations of Errordiary Volunteers

Although virtual citizen science projects have the potential to engage large networks of people in science research, seeding and maintaining such networks can be difficult. A feature of successful projects is that they have well-motivated volunteers. What makes volunteers motivated rather than apathetic? In this paper we focus on projects that contribute to psychology research, which we term ‘citizen psych-science’. This differs from typical citizen science because volunteers are asked to contribute themselves as data. We describe research studies that we conducted with Errordiary — a citizen psych-science project where volunteers tweet about their everyday experiences of human error. These studies were: (1) an interview study, to explore the motivations of eight Errordiary volunteers; and (2) three focus groups, to explore the potential of attracting new communities to Errordiary. We found that the personal nature of the data can influence participation in positive and negative ways. We suggest several factors that scientists need to consider when encouraging citizen psych-science volunteers to contribute their personal experiences towards research

Remote Work, Work Measurement and the State of Work Research in Human-Centred Computing

Over the past few decades, a small but growing group of people have worked remotely from their homes. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people found themselves joining this group overnight. In this position paper, we examine the kinds of work that ‘went remote’ in response to the pandemic, and consider the ways in which this transition was influenced by (and in turn came to influence) contemporary trends in digital workplace measurement and evaluation. We see that employers appeared reluctant to let certain classes of employee work remotely. When the pandemic forced staff home, employers compensated by turning to digital surveillance tools, even though, as we argue, these tools seem unable to overcome the significant conceptual barriers to understanding how people are working. We also observed that, in the United Kingdom context, the pandemic didn’t mean remote work for a significant proportion of the population. We assert that, to maximize its impact, ‘future of work’ research in human-centred computing must be more inclusive and representative of work, rather than focusing on the experiences of knowledge workers and those involved in new forms of work

MOODs: Building massive open online diaries for researchers, teachers and contributors

Internet-based research conducted in partnership with paid crowdworkers and volunteer citizen scientists is an increasingly common method for collecting data from large, diverse populations. We wanted to leverage web-based citizen science to gain insights into phenomena that are part of people’s everyday lives. To do this, we developed the concept of a Massive Open Online Diary (MOOD). A MOOD is a tool for capturing, storing and presenting short updates from multiple contributors on a particular topic. These updates are aggregated into public corpora that can be viewed, analysed and shared. MOODs offer a novel method for crowdsourcing diary-like data in a way that provides value for researchers, teachers and contributors. MOODs also come with unique community-building and ethical challenges. We describe the benefits and challenges of MOODs in relation to Errordiary.org, a MOOD we created to aid our exploration of human error