Toward JUSTIS―A Research Program Aimed at Fostering Business Ethics by Empowering Stakeholders Through Information Systems

As incidents involving corporate social responsibility—or rather the lack thereof—hit headlines at regular intervals, stakeholders are becoming increasingly concerned about ethical issues, thus encouraging researchers to identify problematic business processes and pressing practitioners to start rectifying their questionable courses of action. In the meantime, information systems (IS) are becoming ever more pervasive and ubiquitous and are shaping and altering many of our everyday activities and behavior. We argue that when it comes to promoting ethical behaviors, IS can be used as powerful tools to empower stakeholders, and, thus, it is crucial to consider the role that IS can play in either advancing or deterring ethical—or conversely, unethical—behaviors. In this article, we present a research agenda for a new research program specifically concerned with the task of analyzing the social impact of existing IS and devising new ones that can be used to encourage ethical behavior. JustIS is the name of this program

From Digital Community Engagement to Smoking Cessation: Insights from the Reddit r/StopSmoking Thread

Despite decades of prevention, tobacco addiction is still a widespread health concern responsible for around 8 million deaths per year. Existing digital solutions such as social media are becoming increasingly popular and represent a novel approach for people to find community support. However, little is known about how they affect smoking behavior. This paper tackles this issue by investigating attitudes, motivations and behaviors of 169 users of one such digital community, namely the Reddit r/StopSmoking thread. We present a model based on the transtheoretical model as well as the uses and gratification approach that investigates the support of digital communities in the smoking cessation process. Our findings suggest that engagement in online smoking cessation communities has a positive link to smokers\u27 behavior in their process of change. Providing help, seeking help, seeking information, seeking status and seeking entertainment being identified as motivational factors to engage in such online communities

Digital Ethics Canvas: A Guide For Ethical Risk Assessment And Mitigation In The Digital Domain

Ethical concerns in the digital domain are growing with the extremely fast evolution of technology and the increasing scale at which software is deployed, potentially affecting our societies globally. It is crucial that engineers evaluate more systematically the impacts their solutions can have on individuals, groups, societies and the environment. Ethical risk analysis is one of the approaches that can help reduce “ethical debt”, the unpaid cost generated by ethically problematic technical solutions. However, previous research has identified that novices struggle with the identification of risks and their mitigation. Our contribution is a visual tool, the Digital Ethics Canvas, specifically designed to help engineers scan digital solutions for a range of ethical risks with six “lenses”: beneficence, non-maleficence, privacy, fairness, sustainability and empowerment. In this paper, we present the literature background behind the design of this tool. We also report on preliminary evaluations of the canvas with novices (N=26) and experts (N=16) showing that the tool is perceived as practical and useful, with positive utility judgements from participants

Designing for Digital Wellbeing on a Smartphone: Co-creation of Digital Nudges to Mitigate Instagram Overuse

The endless stream of social media newsfeeds and stories captivates users for hours on end, sometimes exceeding what users themselves consider unhealthy. However, reducing one's social media consumption has proven to be challenging. To address this issue, this study investigates how the co-creation of the digital feedback nudge can improve digital well-being without increasing privacy threats. To achieve this goal, a mixed method study is used through a two-week pre-post study design. Results demonstrate that co-creation significantly increased users' sense of agency, sense of accomplishment and perceived sense of privacy while reducing users' privacy concern. Furthermore, the feedback nudge allowed participants to significantly decrease their social media use

Peer Assessment Dataset

Peer assessment is seen as a powerful supporting tool to achieve scalability in the evaluation of complex assignments in large courses, possibly virtual ones, as in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, the adoption of peer assessment is slow, due in part to the lack of ready-to-use systems. Furthermore, the validity of peer assessment is still under discussion. In this paper, in order to tackle some of these issues, we present a dataset containing the assessment of student submissions by student peers and by instructors during our Social Media course with 60 Master’s level university students. The dataset allows for training and testing algorithms that predict the grades of instructors based on the grades of student peers

Peer Assessment Based on Ratings in a Social Media Course

Peer assessment is seen as a powerful supporting tool to achieve scalability in the evaluation of complex assignments in large courses, possibly virtual ones, as in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, the adoption of peer assessment is slow due in part to the lack of ready-to-use systems. Furthermore, the validity of peer assessment is still under discussion. In this paper, in order to tackle some of these issues, we present as a proof-of-concept of a novel extension of Graasp, a social media platform, to setup a peer assessment activity. We then report a case study of peer assessment using Graasp in a Social Media course with 60 master's level university students and analyze the level of agreement between students and instructors in the evaluation of short individual reports. Finally, to see if both instructor and student evaluations were based on appearance of project reports rather than on content, we conducted a study with 40 kids who rated reports solely on their look. Our results convey the fact that unlike the kid evaluation, which shows a low level of agreement with instructors, student assessment is reliable since the level of agreement between instructors and students was high

The workday of hospital surgeons: what they do, what makes them satisfied, and the role of core tasks and administrative tasks; a diary study.

BACKGROUND Many surgeons report passion for their work, but not all tasks are likely to be satisfying. Little is known about how hospital surgeons spend their days, how they like specific tasks, and the role of core tasks (i.e. surgery-related tasks) versus tasks that may keep them from core tasks (e.g., administrative work). This study aimed at a more detailed picture of hospital surgeons' daily work - how much time they spend with different tasks, how they like them, and associations with satisfaction. METHODS Hospital surgeons (N = 105) responded to a general survey, and 81 of these provided up to five daily questionnaires concerning daily activities and their attractiveness, as well as their job satisfaction. The data were analyzed using t-tests, analysis of variance, as well as analysis of covariance and repeated measures analysis of variance for comparing means across tasks. RESULTS Among 14 tasks, surgery-related tasks took 21.2%, patient-related tasks 21.7% of the surgeons' time; 10.4% entailed meetings and communicating about patients, and 18.6% documentation and administration. The remaining time was spent with teaching, research, leadership and management, and not task-related activities (e.g. walking between rooms). Surgery was rated as most (4.25; SD = .66), administration as least attractive (2.63; SD = .78). A higher percentage of administration predicted lower perceived legitimacy; perceived legitimacy of administrative work predicted job satisfaction (r = .47). Residents were least satisfied; there were few gender differences. CONCLUSIONS Surgeons seem to thrive on their core tasks, most notably surgery. By contrast, administrative duties are likely perceived as keeping them from their core medical tasks. Increasing the percentage of medical tasks proper, notably surgery, and reducing administrative duties may contribute to hospital surgeons' job satisfaction

Rule of Thumb – Effect of Social Button Icons on Interaction

Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very little is known about the influence of the shape on user behaviour. This paper addresses this issue by presenting results of a controlled randomized experiment with 173 users. The results suggest that thumbs up / thumbs down icons are significantly more engaging than the plus one / minus one icons. At the same time, the result shows that type of the icon used has no significant influence on the direction of the vote