Two facts of modern life put family communication needs of busy professionals into ... questions at subjects at random times throughout the day [4]. By using it ...
Combining the Experience Sampling Method with the Day Reconstruction Method Vassilis-Javed Khan1
Panos Markopoulos 1
Wijnand IJsselsteijn1
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Eindhoven University of Technology Den Dolech 2, 5600MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands {v.j.khan; p.markopoulos; w.a.ijsselsteijn}@tue.nl The problem one is faced with, when following a user-centered approach, is how can someone reliably find out the communication needs of busy parents? That is a difficult task because their needs vary very dynamically. Thus to capture them one needs to have a flexible and context sensitive method to fit into the lives of the participants.
ABSTRACT This paper discusses the methodology of a survey of communication needs that aims to inform the design of innovative technologies to support family communication. Following a series of studies that relied on traditional methods: interviews, questionnaires and a field trial of a prototype, we have come to realize that we need a strongly contextualized survey of user needs. The method we adopt and which we discuss relies on a combination of: the Experience Sampling (ESM) and the Day Reconstruction (DRM).
We were faced with the problem of capturing those needs when having performed an interview study with 20 busy parents [2], a field study of a rudimentary PA system [3] and an online survey with 69 participants. The common problem all those methods had was lacking flexibility to fit into the life events of participants. Having that flexibility we now believe that they could reliably capture the communication needs participants had.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Evaluation/methodology.
General Terms Human Factors.
Our efforts got us closer to uncovering the communication needs of busy parents however faced with the problem we mentioned a natural progression to our research was to use the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Having created appropriate tools to execute the method and while piloting them we realized the shortcomings of the method. Some of the shortcomings included usability issues such as reading the question and tapping to insert a text. In addition, the application was perceived tedious because there was a single question that was asked and had usually similar answers. Moreover, there were many moments that participants could not answer the question. Finally, participants wanted to see that their input was actually used and acknowledged by the system. Having experienced the shortcomings an obvious solution to those was the tying up the ESM with the Day Reconstruction Method.
Keywords Communication needs for parents, Experience sampling method, Day reconstruction method.
1. INTRODUCTION Two facts of modern life put family communication needs of busy professionals into pressure: less time to spend in social communication and having to work in distant locations from their loved ones. Current communication media are ubiquitous and mostly affordable however they satisfy those needs partly because one has to spend time and effort to keep in touch. From a technical perspective, the advance of computing will soon enable environments to sense and partly understand the context of the people inhabiting it. Therefore, environments can have information they can share with their inhabitants or with other people with the goal of helping people to keep in touch with minimum effort spend.
We will explain the reasoning of the tie up as well as the tools we have prepared to execute the combined methods in the remainder of this paper.
2. METHOD
We envision that mobile devices and objects of the environment can semi-automatically exchange awareness information between them. We call the technology that shall enable this exchange Pervasive Awareness (PA) [2]. In our project we take a user-centered approach which has as a goal to research how such a technology can fit the communication needs of intrafamily communication and more specifically the communication between parents.
In this section we will first cover the ESM and DRM methods with their pros and cons. Next we will present the tools we prepare for combining the two.
Experience sampling method The ESM is a quasi-naturalistic method that involves signaling questions at subjects at random times throughout the day [4]. By using it, researchers try to capture the experience of the subject at a particular time. Although very useful in capturing a specific
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incident during the day, it has shortcomings such as interrupting the subject from daily activities, asking at inconvenient moments, etc.
Day reconstruction method The DRM on the other hand, assess how people experience their various activities and settings of their lives [1]. Subjects in this case have to reconstruct and reflect on the activities they perform during the day. Shortcomings of the method include the accuracy and difficulty in remembering occurred events. Combining the two The combination of the two methods phases out the shortcomings of each; when a participant is unable to answer when the ESM prompts him to, he can provide the answer at a later time by using the DRM. Furthermore, the main shortcoming of the DRM (difficulty in remembering) is tackled by ESM. The combination of the methods phases out obviously their shortcomings providing the researcher a powerful tool. In practical terms, the ESM is carried out with the use of a mobile device. We have developed software which prompts questions to the participant few times during the day (Figure 2). The DRM is carried out with the use of a website. Initially, the website gathers information about the places and activities a participant performs. This information is then transferred to the mobile device. In this way when the participant is asked what information he is willing to share with his partner he is asked at the same time to define the place and activity he is doing. We decide to develop such a system because from our experience with pilots we saw that it would be very difficult for participants to insert information to the mobile device. Thus we wanted to keep the information input in the mobile device as minimum as possible. We achieve that by asking the participant to make a few choices he is presented rather than to type text. The website offers the possibility to the participant to answer questions he was not able to do in the mobile device as well as provide comments to support his answers. Moreover, the participant can always insert more places and activities, or even update the existing ones, during the development of the study (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The website offers the possibility to the participant to answer questions he was not able to do in the mobile device
3. SUMMARY & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To develop PA we need to know what information under which context participants are willing to share. Therefore it is of great salience to capture the requirements while those arise during the day. However, we focus in a group that has busy lives and it would be a mistake from our part to expect them to have both the time and willingness to answer our questions on the PDA. Therefore we want to combine a web interface, which reconstructs events captured by the PDA device during the day with the use of the PDA itself. The continuous investigation of finding out what information parents would like to automatically exchange between them during a day lead us in concluding that the most suitable method would be a combination of the Experience Sampling method with the Day Reconstruction Method. In this paper we have describe the pros and cons of the two methods as well as our reasoning and tools in combining the two methods. This research would not have been possible without the support of IOP-MMI.
4. REFERENCES [1] Kahneman D., Krueger A.B., Schkade D.A., Schwarz N., Stone A.A., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method” Science 306, 1776 (2004). [2] Khan, V.J., Markopoulos, P., Mota, S., IJsselsteijn, W., de Ruyter, B., “Intra-family communication needs; how can Awareness Systems provide support?”, In proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE06). [3] Khan, V.J., Markopoulos, P., Eggen, B., “On the Role of Awareness Systems for Supporting Parent Involvement in Young Children’s Schooling”, In proceedings of Home/ Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion (HOIT 2007).
Figure 2: Participants are prompted by a mobile device during a day to answer research questions
[4] Kubey, R., Larson R.; Csikszentmihalyi M., “Experience sampling method applications to communication research questions”, Journal of Communication; Spring 1996; 46, 2; ABI/INFORM Global pg. 99.
Our plans are to execute the method with at least 20 busy parents. We are planning to deploy the tools for five working days of theirs.
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