Technology & Well-Being

April 12, 2016 In Technology & Well-Being

Start Research Project. Fix. Then Actually Start.

By Robyn Perry, CTSP Fellow | Permalink

If you were living in a new country, would you know how to enroll your child in school, get access to health insurance, or find affordable legal assistance? And if you didn’t, how would you deal?

As Maggie, Kristen, and I are starting to interview immigrant women living in the US and the organizations that provide support to them, we are trying to understand how they deal – particularly, how they seek social support when they face stress.

This post gives a bit of an orientation to our project and helps us document our research process.

We’ve developed two semi-structured questionnaires to guide our interviews: one for immigrants and one for staff at service providers (organizations that provide immigrants with legal aid, job training, access to resources for navigating life in the US, and otherwise support their entry and integration). We are seeking to learn about women immigrants who have been in the US between 1-7 years. All interviews are conducted in English by one of the team members. For this reason, we are striving for a high degree of consistency in our interview process because we will each be conducting one-on-one interviews separately from each other.

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February 24, 2016 In Engineering Ethics, Technology & Well-Being

Rough cuts on the incredibly interesting implications of Facebook’s Reactions

By Galen Panger, CTSP | Permalink

How do we express ourselves in social media, and how does that make other people feel? These are two questions at the very heart of social media research including, of course, the ill-fated Facebook experiment. Facebook Reactions are fascinating because they are, even more explicitly than the Facebook experiment, an intervention into our emotional lives.

Let me be clear that I support Facebook’s desire to overcome the emotional stuntedness of the Like button (don’t even get me started on the emotional stuntedness of the Poke button). I support the steps the company has taken to expand the Like button’s emotional repertoire, particularly in light of the company’s obvious desire to maintain its original simplicity. But as a choice about which emotional expressions and reactions to officially reward and sanction on Facebook, they are consequential. They explicitly present the company with the knotty challenge of determining the shape of Facebook’s emotional environment, and they have wide implications for the 1.04 billion of us who visit Facebook each day. Here are a few rough reactions to Facebook Reactions.

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November 16, 2015 In Engineering Ethics, Technology & Well-Being

Should Facebook watch out for our well-being?

By Galen Panger, CTSP | Permalink

Last year, when Facebook published the results of its emotional contagion experiment, it triggered a firestorm of criticism in the press and launched a minor cottage industry within academia around the ethical gray areas of Big Data research. What should count as ‘informed consent’ in massive experiments like Facebook’s? What are the obligations of Internet services to seek informed consent when experimentally intervening in the lives, emotions and behaviors of their users? Is there only an obligation when they want to publish in academic journals? These are not easy questions.

Perhaps more importantly, what are the obligations of these Internet services to users and their well-being more broadly?
 

Facebook's Infection

Credit: ‘Facebook’s Infection’ by ksayer1

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