Anchored Audio Sampling

Quick Info

Project Date May 1, 2018 - Sept. 30, 2018
PIs: Alexis Hiniker (PI)
Keywords: experience sampling method, children, ecological momentary assessment, context-aware experience sampling

News

Two Best Paper Awards at CHI'19

Mar 15, 2019 | Jon

We are honored and excited that the Makeability Lab received two 'Best Paper Awards' at CHI'19, which are given to the top 2% of all submissions at the conference. Anchored Audio Sampling: A Seamless Method for Exploring Children’s Thoughts During Deployment Studies by Alexis Hiniker, Jon Froehlich, Mingrui Ray Zhang, Erin Beneteau Project Sidewalk: A Web-based Crowdsourcing Tool for Collecting Sidewalk Accessibility Data At Scale by Manaswi Saha, Michael Saugstad, Hanuma Teja Maddali, Aileen Zeng, Ryan Holland, Steven Bower, Aditya Dash, Sage Chen, Anthony Li, Kotaro Hara, Jon Froehlich

About

Anchored Audio Sampling Timeline

Timeline of an AAS data collection event. The researcher defnes events of interest, which become the anchor points. Recording occurs during a sliding window surrounding the anchor event.

Many traditional HCI methods, such as surveys and interviews, are of limited value when working with preschoolers. In this project, we present anchored audio sampling (AAS), a remote data collection technique for extracting qualitative audio samples during field deployments with young children. AAS offers a developmentally sensitive way of understanding how children make sense of technology and situates their use in the larger context of daily life. AAS is defined by an anchor event, around which audio is collected. A sliding window surrounding this anchor captures both antecedent and ensuing recording, providing the researcher insight into the activities that led up to the event of interest as well as those that followed. We present themes from three deployments that leverage this technique, highlighting its usefulness in contextualizing children’s experiences as well as its limitations. Based on our experiences using AAS, we have also developed a reusable open source library for embedding AAS into any Android application.