Author Archives: Lana Yarosh

About Lana Yarosh

Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at University of Minnesota. Her research in HCI focuses on embodied interaction in social computing systems. Lana is currently most proud of being one of the inaugural recipients of the NSF CRII award, of her best papers at CHI 2013 and CSWC 2014, and of receiving the Fran Allen IBM Fellowship. Lana has two Bachelors of Science from University of Maryland (in Computer Science and Psychology), a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, and two years of industry research experience with AT&T Labs Research.

Validated Measures for Family Communication Investigations

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There are many advantages to using validated instruments while evaluating a family communication system. First, we can claim that the questions we ask actually measure what we think they measure. Second, if multiple studies use the same instrument, new forms of analysis become possible — allowing us to better build on each other’s work and conduct meta-analyses. Third, using validated instruments allows us to have better conversations outside of our immediate field. There are a number of validated instruments out there that may be useful and I want to highlight a few here. Other instruments that researchers in this domain have found relevant that have been listed on the Designing for Families wiki and that’s a good place to add to if you know of something good.

When evaluating communication technology, you may want to make claims about its effect on various aspects of the relationship between the people it is meant to connect. I suggest using the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI) or Social Connectedness Questionnaire (specific version) in this case. If the relationship you are measuring is of a specific type (e.g. parent and child, married couple), it may also make sense to use a more targeted validated measure such as the Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire. Sometimes, a technology may not be designed for a specific pair of people, but rather meant to increase a given users general sense of connectedness to others or emotional well-being. Two useful measures in this case are the Social Connectedness Questionnaire (overall version) and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).

All of the measures I mentioned so far measure outcomes but do not ask the participant to reflect on the technology that used. If this seems useful to you, you may want to take a look at the Affective Benefits and Costs Questionnaire (ABC-Q). I’ve been designing and validating a more focused version of it called the Affective Benefits and Costs of Communication Technologies (ABCCT) questionnaire. I have preliminary validations of versions for use with both children and adults, so feel free to try them out.

However, all of the above measures are really only useful if the person has had an opportunity to try your technology over a period of time so that changes in relationships, affect, and communication practices can be detected. However, there are a few validated measures that I find to be valid after a short interaction (such as a lab study). The Networked Minds Social Presence Measure is appropriate to use with adults. I have not had success adapting it to children as I think they may have trouble reflecting on a short interaction in this abstract fashion. With children, I’ve had more success using validated observational metrics to code video of system use, for example the Howes levels of social play coding scheme when looking at remote play.

If there is no validated measure for the aspect you are investigating, it may make sense to design and validate something that others would be able to use. I’d love to hear about this kind of work if anybody is doing it and early designs of such surveys.

All Mentioned Measures:

  • Bel, D.T. van, Smolders, K.C.H.J., IJsselsteijn, W.A., and Kort, Y.A.W. de. Social connectedness : concept and measurement. International Conference on Intelligent Environments, IOS Press (2011), 67-74.
  • Furman, W. and Buhrmester, D. The Network of Relationships Inventory: Behavioral Systems Version. International journal of behavioral development 33, 5 (2009), 470-478.
  • Furman, W. Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire. In J. Touliatos, B.F. Perlmutter, M.A. Straus and G.W. Holden, eds., Handbook of Family Measurement Techniques. SAGE, 2001, 285-289.
  • Harms, C. and Biocca, F. Internal consistency and reliability of the networked minds social presence measure. (2004), 246.
  • Howes, C., Unger, O., and Seidner, L.B. Social Pretend Play in Toddlers: Parallels with Social Play and with Solitary Pretend. Child Development Vol. 60, N. 1 (1989), 77-84.
  • IJsselsteijn, W., Baren, J. Van, Markopoulos, P., Romero, N., and Ruyter, B. de. Measuring Affective Benefits and Costs of Mediated Awareness: Development and Validation of the ABC-Questionnaire. In Awareness Systems. 2009, 473-488.
  • Thompson, E.R. Development and Validation of an Internationally Reliable Short-Form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 38, 2 (2007), 227-242.
  • Yarosh, S. and Markopoulos, P. Design of an instrument for the evaluation of communication technologies with children. Proc. of IDC, ACM (2010), 266–269.

Mobile Is in the Pocket of the Beholder

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Nowadays, we like our devices to be mobile, ubiquitous, and on-the-body. Phones are used as proxies for location, platforms for a plethora of sensors, and information delivery vehicles, in addition to communication devices. Whole research communities are growing around the idea of wearable computing. It is clearly compelling to always have access to certain computing devices on the body.

My roommate used to carry this phone in his pocket in high school. Less than half of the phone fits in my pocket.

The current way that we keep something on the body is called pockets (unlike purses, you can’t set down a pocket — it’s always with you). And this brings me to the question of gendered clothing and a big disparity in term of what it means to be “pocket-sized.”

I’ll give a few examples. For a long time, mobile phones and PDAs were pocket-sized for men, but not women. See the picture to the left of me trying to carry a 1999 phone in my back pocket. Not very nice at all! Yet, my (male) roommate reported no trouble carrying it in the front pocket of his JNCOs.

You’d think that the problem has been somewhat resolved by now. Certainly, I can almost entirely fit my iPhone in my back pocket nowadays. But, the back pocket is not a convenient place to carry a rectangular device (especially, if you have some curves in that region). Thus, see below for what happens when I put the iPhone in my front pocket. Again, not very nice at all!

This is as far as an iPhone will fit into the front pocket of my jeans.

So, I’d like to put a challenge out there. If you design clothes, how about something more technology-friendly for women to wear? If you design technology, how about something that works with the clothes that women wear?

I would like a way of transporting my mobile devices that: [1] I cannot set down and lose, [2] that is easy to access in a public setting (so, no putting things in my bra if I need to look at them at any point during the day), and [3] that is comfortable in both standing and sitting positions.

Ideas?

Experimenting at Home: The Role of Auto-Biographical Research in Designing for the Family

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?