There has been a rich tradition in ethnography of gaining access to certain communities by using family connections (e.g., the famous Addler & Addler studies of schoolyard dynamics). Similarly, in the design of family communication technologies, it is not unusual for researchers to test new communication technologies with their own families (e.g., Hermes@Home by Saslis-Lagoudakis, Cheverst, Dix, Fitton, & Rouncefield).
Recently, at the “Technology for Today’s Family” workshop we discussed the possibilities of auto-biographical research in this domain. The appeal is clear: it solves the problem of finding willing families, it allows for longer deployments, it allows for ongoing debugging, and it allows access to the kind of data that would otherwise be impossible to get. However, how should such a study be reported? What is the possible role of investigations conducted in the researcher’s home?
In both of the examples from the first paragraph, the researchers revealed their relationship to the participants of the study. However, several recent studies in this domain (3 different that I am aware of) have left this information undisclosed. This never seemed malicious or purposefully misleading. Corresponding with these authors, they mentioned two major classes of reasons for not disclosing relationships to participants:
- It is common in HCI to use participants you know (e.g., other students in your lab) and not reveal those relationships. It is up to the researcher to decide whether using known participants affected the study results. If the estimate is that it didn’t, there is no need to waste precious paper space disclosing relationships.
- In general, participants in HCI studies are presented in an anonymous fashion. Articulating a relationship to the author would break this anonymity (since we don’t publish anonymously). Shouldn’t members of the researchers’ family receive the same protection as other participants?
I will not disclose the actual papers because I respect the anonymity of others’ families. But, I think this is an important question for us to decide as a community moving forward. Here are three proposed directions for moving forward:
- It’s fine as it is now. There are big advantages to the access that can be gained by doing research with our own families, and disclosing relationships to participants should be up to the researcher’s discretion.
- Familial relationships to participants should always be disclosed and implications discusses in the paper. The price of doing research with one’s own family is the loss of their anonymity. The researcher should make sure all family participants consent to their relationships to the author appearing in the paper.
- We shouldn’t do research with our own families at all. We run into the risk of designing more for families that are like our own, losing out on the chance to hear from other types of families.
I would really like to hear the opinions of others on this topic. What do you think would be the most reasonable approach to take?
The discussion around this post seems to have developed more on Facebook, so I’m pasting that discussion here.
Khai Truong: i’ve seen some work in which an author has been a participant even…and it wasn’t disclosed. i am not a fan of studies where there are conflicts of interest like this. you are right, disclosing this information could potentially be breaking participants’ anonymity, but if the research team chose to go in this direction, then they should be forth coming about it. my $0.02
Lana Yarosh: Thanks, Khai. I’ve never do work with my own family, but I can think of a situation where I would potentially not disclose participation. What if my bro was a participant and I reported him doing something that would get him in trouble with our parents? Though, I suppose, I would then think hard about publishing it at all…
Khai Truong: in my opinion, the researchers should know that there’s a conflict of interest and potential bias introduced by having such participants in the study and should disclose this when reporting the information to the research community. how they do this, i’m not sure. but personally, i wouldn’t feel comfortable having my mom’s comment about a how great a system is at helping her do whatever without disclosing that it was my mommy.
Khai Truong: i should add that i do think sometimes it does depend on the type of study too =)
Tanya Tolles Markow: I agree with Khai that it should be very clearly disclosed by the researcher in his/her work.
Lana Yarosh: Thanks for the feedback, guys!
Carman Neustaedter: Great blog entry, Lana. I think that we can learn something by studying all sorts of people, even those we know or ourselves for that matter. In any case, disclosure is very important so that others can accurately understand the findings. People can evaluate systems through ‘autobiographical design’ (http://clab.iat.sfu.ca/uploads/Main/AutobiographicalDesign.pdf) Overall, a lot depends on the type of study and what you are trying to report. I think in some cases it matters less if you know a person. Such studies certainly need to go beyond “Person X liked the system though” to reporting on changes in routines, practices, etc.
Lana Yarosh: Good paper, Carman! I should read DIS proceedings more often. I didn’t realize that my advisor has been responsible for so many self-use systems!
Khai Truong: Lana, yes, but if you’ll notice though, 2 of those papers were not written as evaluation papers but as systems design papers. In fact, they don’t really even talk about any type of usage driving the design even. And the other papers are not the end-all to those work; there are additional papers with larger studies. I believe your advisor is pretty open about the fact that he is a builder and believes in the fail-fast approach, so it’s shouldn’t be that surprising.
Lana, great post, and a topic I have been thinking about for a while. I had to miss the family technology workshop because I was running a different one on the same day. I want to particularly respond to your third point for moving forward.
Many of us are inspired by our own experiences and families for our research. This includes, for example, your advisor, as well as me in my “busyness” research, being a full-time academic and mother. And even when we do research with other families, not our own, we see them through the lens of our own experiences, practices, and values: what kind of relationships do we have with our spouses? With our parents? What expectations do we have from our children? From ourselves as family members?
That said, with Maria Hakansson and funding from Nokia, I am currently running a research study on busyness in farm families. Our purpose is to find out what busyness looks like in families that are NOT necessarily like our own (academics, urban/suburban, middle class, married, etc.). Our sample has a wide variety of families – an couple that has been farming for 40 years vs. those who started as the farm as a retirement hobby; a young family with infants just starting out, and those with teenage and older children; a family with 9 homeschooled children and one with 1 child who attends public school; families with only one member working in the farm and families where all members, including young and grown children, work on the farm; and so on.
Their practices and values of busyness are in some senses similar to mine, and in others very different. What we learn from them we will take toward designing not necessarily for farm families, but for ones like our own, as a way to offer practices and values that are non-existent in middle-class/urban/academic families but that may be introduced through design.
Thanks for the reply! So you’re saying that insight from our own families can inform research and families like ours can be an interesting case study point, but it’s important to also investigate families that are unlike ours.
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