Researching Procrastination on Social Networking Sites

Procrastination has become an important field in academic research. It refers to a voluntary delay that might lead to negative consequences such as low academic performance, low work productivity, and anxiety. Numerous studies have examined the factors that might lead people to procrastinate, such as low self-efficacy, low self-regulation, and low self-esteem. However, Social networking sites (SNSs) might be partially responsible for people procrastinating because users may stay online rather than performing their urgent tasks. SNS users have increased significantly in recent years, and this raises the question of whether the design of SNS features has contributed to users procrastinating and why this is the case? The research studies the relationship between SNS feature design and procrastination and also identify what features of SNSs might be able to predict the likelihood of user procrastination. Furthermore, we identified different countermeasures that can be introduced to the future design of SNS in order to combat procrastination. Then, the research develops a method that helps users to gain more control over their procrastination. This method is informed by psychological theories, interactive design, and usability evaluation and testing. The method can be used to inform software engineers when developing the design features for future software in order to help users to gain more control over their procrastination. To achieve this goal, several studies were conducted with SNS users. These studies include focus group, diary study, co-design, and online questionnaire. The results of these studies will guide the research to devise the final method of the research. The final method will be supported by persuasive techniques in order to help users to change their behaviour and gain more control over their procrastination without forcing them to change. In the following sub-sections we explained the procedures and provided the supplementary materials that we used in each study

Procrastination on social networking sites: types, triggers, and socio-technical countermeasures.

Procrastination has become an important field in academic research and refers to a voluntary delay in performing tasks that need to be done. Procrastination can lead to negative consequences such as low academic performance, low work productivity and anxiety. Numerous studies have examined the factors that may lead people to procrastinate, such as low self-efficacy, low self-regulation and low self-esteem. Social networking sites (SNSs) may facilitate procrastination; for example, notifications could be a distraction that promotes procrastination for people, preventing them from performing their original tasks. This Thesis aims to understand how procrastination on SNS occurs, the role of SNS design in triggering it and how to engineer social media to combat it through existing and novel features. Then, this knowledge will be used to develop a method to combat procrastination on SNS. This method will be informed by psychological theories as well as technical and socio-technical countermeasures. To achieve this goal, a mixed methods approach was conducted with SNS users, including focus groups and diary studies, co-design sessions and surveys. The results of these studies helped to develop a method that helps users to gain more control over their procrastination on SNS. The developed method is supported by persuasive techniques including reminders and suggestions, which help to persuade users to change their usage style without forcing them toward the change. Finally, the developed method was evaluated with SNS users who self-declared as procrastinators on SNS. The evaluation study examines five aspects: clarity, procrastination awareness, coverage, effectiveness and acceptance. The results demonstrated that the combating procrastination on SNS method (D-Crastinate) helps to improve users’ control over their procrastination

A Deterministic Finite-State Morphological Analyzer for Urdu Nominal System

The morphological analyzer is a computational process that combines lemmas with other linguistic features to produce new lexical word forms. This paper investigates the processing of a nominal system in the Urdu language. It focuses on the inflections of noun forms and studies number, gender, person, and case representations, using a Finite State Machine (FSM) to analyze and create all the possible forms of the standardized registers. The application of the analysis using this tool provides and displays all the possible structures and their declensions. This study adds all the necessary features and values to the lexical concatenating nouns according to their patterns. The accuracy score of the output is 92.7, where the actual output depends on the detailed design of the FSM and the specific morphological processes provided to the finite state tools

Procrastination on Social Networks: Types and Triggers

Procrastination refers to a voluntary delay of a needed or committed task that might hurt productivity and wellbeing requirements such as self-acceptance, personal growth and positive relations with others. People might procrastinate due to a lack of motivation towards performing a task or a mismatch between the task and their skills. Social Networks Sites (SNS) are designed to provide users with the opportunity to socialise and feel relatedness despite being physically separated. SNSs design is typically equipped with a rich set of persuasive tools to encourage more social interaction. Such tools can entice procrastination when users have low self-regulation ability, and seek avoidance and mood modification. As a first step in designing persuasive features which would help people control their procrastination, there is a need to understand how existing SNS features persuade procrastination in the first place. In this paper, we conduct a multi-stage qualitative study to explore the occurrence of procrastination and the prominent features of SNS design that trigger and facilitate it. We use focus groups to explore SNS procrastination, and then get a more ecologically valid, detailed and in-context data via a ten days’ diary study followed by clarification interviews. The findings shed light on prominent types of procrastination and features in SNS design that can persuade and increase, in certain contexts, the chance for procrastination

Procrastination on Social Networking Sites: Combating by Design

Procrastination refers to a voluntary postponement that prevents people from performing their tasks and can hurt productivity and wellbeing. Procrastination might occur due to a lack of motivation to perform tasks or due to the low self-control that people might have over their time and task management. Social Networking Sites (hereafter SNS) are designed to enable their users to engage in online interaction for different purposes such as increasing popularity or exploring information. SNS embed influence and persuasion techniques to attract users which can make them a medium for procrastination where some users fail to maintain a desirable level of self-control over their usage. However, we argue that advances in persuasive technology and gamification techniques can be utilised to augment SMS and help users to regain self-control over their procrastination. Implementing these techniques correctly means that users can still enjoy accessing SNS while maintaining a desirable level of control over their procrastination. Building these antiprocrastination tools, however, is a challenging design activity due to their potential of triggering negative side-effects such as reactance and workarounds, and affecting the overall user experience. In this paper, we conduct user studies, consisting of an exploratory stage using focus groups, diary study and interviews and followed by a design stage based mainly on codesign sessions. Our studies’ participants self-declared having a problematic degree of procrastination on SNS, to explore procrastination countermeasure techniques that can augment the future designs of SNS and how best to apply them

Managing Procrastination on Social Networking Sites: The D-Crastinate Method.

Procrastination refers to the voluntary avoidance or postponement of action that needs to be taken, that results in negative consequences such as low academic performance, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Previous work has demonstrated the role of social networking site (SNS) design in users' procrastination and revealed several types of procrastination on SNS. In this work, we propose a method to combat procrastination on SNS (D-Crastinate). We present the theories and approaches that informed the design of D-Crastinate method and its stages. The method is meant to help users to identify the type of procrastination they experience and the SNS features that contribute to that procrastination. Then, based on the results of this phase, a set of customised countermeasures are suggested for each user with guidelines on how to apply them. To evaluate our D-Crastinate method, we utilised a mixed-method approach that included a focus group, diary study and survey. We evaluate the method in terms of its clarity, coverage, efficiency, acceptance and whether it helps to increase users' consciousness and management of their own procrastination. The evaluation study involved participants who self-declared that they frequently procrastinate on SNS. The results showed a positive impact of D-Crastinate in increasing participants' awareness and control over their procrastination and, hence, enhancing their digital wellbeing

Procrastination on social media: predictors of types, triggers and acceptance of countermeasures

© 2021, The Author(s). Procrastination refers to the voluntary delay of urgent tasks and can have several negative consequences such as stress, health issues and academic under-achievement. Several factors including personality, culture and gender have been identified as predictors of procrastination, although there are some conflicting findings within the literature. Social networking sites have been identified as a possible facilitator of procrastination, in part due to their design features that encourage immersion and continual interaction. However, social networking sites also provide the opportunity for intelligent, real-time prevention and intervention strategies to be delivered that can reduce the experience of procrastination. In this paper, we build upon our research in which we used a mixed-method approach to explore the types, triggers and acceptance of countermeasures for procrastination on social media. Following a survey of 288 participants from the UK (n = 165) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (n = 123), we conducted a series of multiple regression and binary logistic regression models to determine predictors of these factors. Several predictors such as self-control and conscientiousness were found to be significant predictors, but overall, the amount of variance explained by the regression models was relatively low. The results demonstrate that participants are receptive to countermeasures for procrastination being delivered through social networking sites but suggest that the predictors of procrastination related phenomena experienced in social networking sites are different than in offline settings

A Proposed Framework for Human-like Language Processing of ChatGPT in Academic Writing

The study proposed a framework for analyzing and measuring the ChatGPT capabilities as a generic language model. This study aims to examine the capabilities of the emerging technological Artificial Intelligence tool (ChatGPT) in generating effective academic writing. The proposed framework consists of six principles (Relatedness, Adequacy, Limitation, Authenticity, Cognition, and Redundancy) related to Artificial Language Processing which would explore the accuracy and proficiency of this algorithm-generated writing. The researchers used ChatGPT to obtain some academic texts and paragraphs in different genres as responses to some textbased academic queries. A critical analysis of the content of these academic texts was conducted based on the proposed framework principles. The results show that despite ChatGPT’s exceptional capabilities, its serious defects are evident, as many issues in academic writing are raised. The major issues include information repetition, nonfactual inferences, illogical reasoning, fake references, hallucination, and lack of pragmatic interpretation. The proposed framework would be a valuable guideline for researchers and practitioners interested in analyzing and evaluating recently emerging machine languages of AI language models