Smart phone based systems for social psychological research: Challenges and design guidelines

Abstract

Social psychology research deals with understanding many aspects of human behavior, and this helps not only to gain insights into this complex phenomenon but also to provide useful feedback to the participants. Social psychological research is mainly conducted through self-reports and surveys, however, this methodology is laborious and requires considerable offline analysis. Moreover, self-reports are also found to be biased towards pleasant experiences. Mobile phones represent a perfect platform for conducting social psychological research as they are ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and sensor-rich devices. However, limited battery and computing power, and expensive data plans make it difficult to support various demanding sensing and computation requirements of the social psychological research. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges in building systems based on off-the-shelf mobile phones for conducting social experiments, and provide design guidelines based on our recent works for implementing such systems. © 2011 ACM