Jessica Pater

No longer wearing: investigating the abandonment of personal health-tracking technologies on craigslist

Personal health-tracking technologies have become a part of mainstream culture. Their growing popularity and widespread adoption present an opportunity for the design of new interventions to improve wellness and health. However, there is an increasing concern that these technologies are failing to inspire long-term adoption. In order to understand why users abandon personal health-tracking technologies, we analyzed advertisements of secondary sales of such technologies on Craigslist. We conducted iterative inductive and deductive analyses of approximately 1600 advertisements of personal health-tracking technologies posted over the course of one month across the US. We identify health motivations and rationales for abandonment and present a set of design implications. We call for improved theories that help translate between existing theories designed to explain psychological effects of health behavior change and the technologies that help people make those changes.

Communities of participation: A comparison of disability and aging identified groups on Facebook and LinkedIn

Communication-oriented Internet technologies and activities such as social media sites and blogs, have become an important component of community and employment participation, not just in the specific function of activities, but as a link to larger communities of practice and professional connections. The occurrence of these activities, evident in their presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and other online communities, represents an important opportunity to reframe and re-conceptualize manifestation of communities especially those in which distributed networks and communities substitute for geographic proximity, offering new opportunities for engagement, especially those who might be functionally limited in terms of mobility. For people with disabilities, as well as the aging, increasingly interacting online, the readiness of social networking sites to accommodate their desire to participate in conjunction with their readiness as users to maximize the potential of platform interfaces and architecture, are critical to achieving the mediums potential for enhancing community and employment benefits. This essay explores representation/presence of disability and aging using as frames, Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Target identity/member groups on Facebook and LinkedIn were cataloged to explore the presence and representation of disability and aging identities in a socially networked setting. The groups for this study were identified using the search feature designed into the platform architecture, which allow a user to search on specifically designated entities or keywords. Findings suggest that from a policy perspective, institutions need to be cognizant of population characteristics as well as platform opportunities implementing advocacy and relevant support services for people with disabilities and older adults to full ensure engagement and participation.

#thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities

Pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities on social media encourage the adoption and maintenance of disordered eating habits as acceptable alternative lifestyles rather than threats to health. In particular, the social networking site Instagram has reacted by banning searches on several pro-ED tags and issuing content advisories on others. We pre-sent the first large-scale quantitative study investigating pro-ED communities on Instagram in the aftermath of moderation -- our dataset contains 2.5M posts between 2011 and 2014. We find that the pro-ED community has adopted non-standard lexical variations of moderated tags to circumvent these restrictions. In fact, increasingly complex lexical variants have emerged over time. Communities that use lexical variants show increased participation and support of pro-ED (15-30%). Finally, the tags associated with content on these variants express more toxic, self-harm, and vulnerable content. Despite Instagrams moderation strategies, pro-ED communities are active and thriving. We discuss the effectiveness of content moderation as an intervention for communities of deviant behavior.

“Hunger Hurts but Starving Works”: Characterizing the Presentation of Eating Disorders Online

Within the CSCW community, little has been done to systematically analyze online eating disorder (ED) user generated content. In this paper, we present the results of a cross-platform content analysis of ED-related posts. We analyze the way that hashtags are used in ad-hoc ED- focused networks and present a comprehensive corpus of ED-terminology that frequently accompanies ED activities online. We provide exemplars of the types of ED-related content found online. Through this characterization of activities, we draw attention to the increasingly important role that these platforms play and how they are used and misappropriated for negative health purposes. We also outline specific challenges associated with researching these types of networks online. CAUTION: This paper includes media that could potentially be a trigger to those dealing with an eating disorder or with other self-injury illnesses. Please use caution when reading, printing, or disseminating this paper.

Multimodal Classification of Moderated Online Pro-Eating Disorder Content

Social media sites are challenged by both the scale and variety of deviant behavior online. While algorithms can detect spam and obscenity, behaviors that break community guidelines on some sites are difficult because they have multimodal subtleties (images and/or text). Identifying these posts is often regulated to a few moderators. In this paper, we develop a deep learning classifier that jointly models textual and visual characteristics of pro-eating disorder content that violates community guidelines. Using a million Tumblr photo posts, our classifier discovers deviant content efficiently while also maintaining high recall (85%). Our approach uses human sensitivity throughout to guide the creation, curation, and understanding of this approach to challenging, deviant content. We discuss how automation might impact community moderation, and the ethical and social obligations of this area.

Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms

Harassment in online spaces is increasingly part of public debate and concern. Pervasive problems like cyberbullying, hate speech, and the glorification of self-harm have highlighted the breadth and depth of harassment taking place online. In this study we conduct a content analysis of the governing policies for fifteen social media platforms as they relate to harassment (of oneself and/or of community members) and other associated behaviors. We find that there is a striking inconsistency in how platform-specific policies depict harassment. Additionally, how these policies prescribe responses to harassment vary from mild censuring to the involvement of law enforcement. Finally, based on our analysis and findings, we discuss the potential for harnessing the power of the online communities to create norms around problematic behaviors.

Just awful enough: the functional dysfunction of the something awful forums

The Something Awful Forums (SAF) is an online community comprised of a loosely connected federation of forums, united in a distinctive brand of humor with a focus on the quality of member contributions. In this case study we find that the site has sustained success while deviating from common conventions and norms of online communities. Humor and the quality of content contributed by SAF members foster practices that seem counterintuitive to the development of a stable and thriving community. In this case study we show how design decisions are contextual and inter-dependent and together these heuristics create a different kind of online third place that challenges common practices.

E-Accessibility and Municipal Wi-Fi: Exploring a Model for Inclusivity and Implementation

One of the typical design objectives of municipal Wi-Fi systems is the free or low-cost provision of connectivity for citizens, including people with disabilities and others impacted by the digital divide. This paper examines a range of municipal Wi-Fi implementation models for potential impact on e-accessibility. A comparative analysis was undertaken of sample U.S. and European municipal Wi-Fi systems to assess the business model and stakeholders involved in municipal wireless initiatives and to examine the degree of accessibility to or sensitivity of, municipal wireless systems for people with disabilities. As many people with disabilities are currently affected by social disparities in education and income, further marginalization of their communication and information access creates additional access barriers to critical information and full participation in community life.

Research Ethics Town Hall Meeting

As technology and data access continue to evolve, research ethics in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and social computing are becoming increasingly complex. Despite increasing interest among researchers, there is still a lack of consistent community norms around ethical gray areas. One charge of the SIGCHI ethics committee is to help develop these norms by facilitating open conversations with different stakeholders. This panel will be an opportunity to develop a collective understanding of diverse perspectives on ethics, and to gather input from the GROUP research community around the ethical challenges we face as researchers who study social and collaborative computing systems and those who use these systems.

Addressing medication adherence technology needs in an aging population

Using technology to inspire behavior change motivated by a health goal is a challenge. Technologies, often rooted in sound scientific principles, sometimes do not perform as expected in real world scenarios. Quite often the barriers to use are not inherent in the behavior change model of the product or service, but are issues associated with the failure to appropriately consider the needs of the end users when designing an intervention. We deployed a large, multi-stage research study with aging adults to assess the facilitators and barriers of technologies aimed to create or support behavior changes related to medication adherence. Using the Fogg Behavior model, we analyzed the triggers made on behavior change through data from surveys, in-home interviews, participatory design workshops and the deployed technologies. Our results indicate that the user experience associated with delivery of the content is at least as important as the content. Additionally, experienced users are far better prepared to help researchers identify potential design issues than novice users. Because our participants were knowledgeable about the technologies and the features that worked and did not work, the concluding participatory design sessions were highly efficient in providing feedback on the type of mechanisms that resonate with this population and could lead to higher levels of behavior change in future technologies.