Project Scope

This project began in 2015 and aimed to explore how data aggregated and inferred from increasingly ubiquitous smart devices might violate users' expectations of privacy, and understand norms surrounding this derived data. I was involved in the project beginning in February 2020, as interviews were being conducted. These interviews presented participants with a report visualizing their own driving behavior, collected over a three month period, with some reports including inferences made from the data. I aided in transcript cleaning, annotation, and analysis, including the development of a presentation focus, for a poster submitted to SOUPS 2021 at the end of May 2020.

Process

The interviews were conducted by the project PI, and were carefully designed to elicit only participant reactions without any prompting from the interviewer. The interviews were held over Zoom, and the participant viewed an online report and shared their screen, and then reacted to the data they saw in the report, as well as answering inteviewer questions about where they thought the data and inferences might have come from. A graduate student researcher and I worked on cleaning these interview transcripts, as well as annotating them using the video recording of the meeting to include the on-screen elements of the interview in the written transcripts.

Following the completion of the interviews and the tidying of the transcripts, we, along with two other post-doc/graduate team members, imported the transcripts into the NVivo qualitative coding software, and went through several rounds of coding and discussion to determine an analysis focus for the SOUPS submission. We first utilized in vivo coding, and then began to develop a thematic codebook that went through several iterations as we used it, taking advantage of our four-person team to develop ideas independently and discuss them together to come to our final research questions and codebook.

At the end of this process, we split the transcripts and conducted a final round of coding for the themes for our poster, using this final codebook. After discussing and finalizing our coding, we wrote summaries of the patterns within each code. Two members of our team used these summaries as a jumping-off point to work on the extended abstract for our poster. I was responsible for creating the poster itself, which I used Powerpoint for. The poster and abstract centered on participant reactions to one inference from the driving data report, and was presented virtually at the SOUPS 2021 poster session on August 9th, 2021.