Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-Based Community Technology

Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-Based Community Technology Shelly D. Farnham, Joseph F. McCarthy, Yagnesh Patel, Sameer Ahuja, Daniel Norman, William R. Hazlewood, Josh Lind CHI April 9, 2009

CoCollage The Strands Community Collage (CoCollage™) promotes awareness, interactions and community in third places where people seek conversation and connection. Web site for sharing and conversation Large display showing “Community Collage”

Third Places Semi-public places away  from home (first places) and work (second places) People gather to enjoy  conversation with friends and strangers Facilitate community  development frequent serendipitous  interactions increased likelihood of  developing web of interpersonal relationships

Existing “Technologies” for Community Development in Third Places Challenging to get to know who comes regularly over  time, what they are like, and start conversations

CoCollage: Expanding Impact of Place web site large display synchronous awareness and conversation asynchronous in cafe awareness, sharing and conversation in café or at home

CoCollage Features Uploading People and profiles Commenting, voting Messaging Shared items (photos & quotes) The big screen

Related Work The Notification Collage [Greenberg &  Rounding, 2001] small work groups The Plasma Poster Network [Churchill,  et al., 2003], professional content EyeCanvas (Plasma Poster for a café  environment) [Churchill, et al., 2006] BlueBoard [Russell, et al., 2002]  AutoSpeakerID, Ticket2Talk and  Neighborhood Window [McCarthy, et al., 2004 C3 Collage [McCarthy, et al., 2008]  CityWall [Peltonen, et al., 2008]  EyeCanvas

Early Deployment Study Procedure  Deploy to local coffee shop: Trabant,  working closely with owners Observations, interviews and  questionnaire Goals  develop a better understanding of  the psycho-social factors that would impact adoption and use get immediate feedback for  iteratively improving design explore how best to measure place-  based community development for future studies

Factors Expected to Influence Adoption and Use The size and activity of the existing  community the extent to which the individual  has a desire to meet others through the café the individual’s existing levels of  psychological sense of community and place attachment to the café

Measurements Size and activity of community  Site observations (163 people, 7 hours)  Interviews with café owners  Questionnaire (69 people)  Psycho-social factors:  Psychological sense of community in place  Standardized measure (Wilkinson, 2007) adapted for place  “A feeling of fellowship runs deep between me and others at  Trabant” “I feel loyal to the people at Trabant”  “My friendships and associations with others at Trabant mean a lot”  Desire to connect 

Measurement Cont’d Place attachment  Rosenbaum et al. in study of a suburban diner  People who experienced social support through  diner, developed place attachment – bond between person and place Place Sense of Attachment Community Used items that loaded highly on three factors:  Functional dependency: “I get more satisfaction out of Trabant than other  cafes” Commitment: “I really care about the fate of Trabant”  Identification with self: “The success of Trabant is my success” 

Size and Activity of Community Owners are dedicated to developing a strong community, and have positive  attitude towards technology Who:  Estimated about 400 “regulars” visited once or twice a week  48% male, 52% female, mean age = 29  23% students, 51% white collar/professional  Level of activity at cafe:  At any point in time, 17 people in the café  23 new people each hour  Stayed an average of 25 minutes each  Type of activities at cafe:  64% sat down to drink their coffee  38% came in with friends, chatted with each other  12% chatted with barista, 2 chatted across the table  Questionnaire: Chatting with friends (65%), reading (46%), working on laptop (39%) 

Questionnaire: Existing Community Size of their existing café network:  58% had at least one acquaintance in café, of those averaging 4.2 each  25% had at least one personal friend, of those averaging 2.8 each  Psycho social factors:  Satisfied with café (M = 5.6)*  Lukewarm in sense of community (M = 3.5)*  Place attachment on dependency (M = 5.4)* and commitment (M = 5.3)*  factors, but less so on identity (M = 3.4)* Desire to connect with others  56% had some or more interest in meeting others at the café  suggests roughly half of regulars would want to join CoCollage  *on scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = not at all and 7 = extremely so

Raw Correlations Sense of  community and place attachment strongly correlated Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

Raw Correlations Of 69 who  completed questionnaire, 24 also joined CoCollage Sense of  community, place attachment, and desire to connect correlated with whether joined CoCollage Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

Predictors of Adoption Simultaneous logistic regression, looks for unique effects on binomial dependent variable: Sense of community c2(1, N = 54) = 19.18, p < .001 Youth c2(1, N = 54) = 9.69, p < .002 Place attachment c2(3, N = 54) = 7.42, p < .06 Desire to connect c2(1, N = 54) = 5.66, p < .06 Gender c2(1, N = 54) = 3.61, p < .06 (N = 54 because if any missing variable, person excluded)

CoCollage Usage 82 users in first month  Primary usage:   create a profile  browse other profiles  upload images  View others’ images Significant correlation between  desire to make friends and  number of comments (r = .43, p < .05)  number of unique days they have returned to the system (r = .43, p < .05) Percentage of users who engaged in each type of activity, with means

Conclusions Within first month, decent adoption  82 out of roughly 400 regulars joined CoCollage in the first month  Questionnaire results shows that people who  a) are looking to connect with others b) already have a psychological sense of community at the café c) already feel place attachment to the café, are more likely to join CoCollage and start conversations Psychological sense of community for place and place  attachment are meaningful constructs in predicting adoption of a place-based community technology

Questions? Shelly Farnham  Research Consultant  WaggleLabs.com  shelly@wagglelabs.com  CoCollage  CoCollage.com  Joe McCarthy: mccarthy@strands.com  Learn more at Communities and Technologies in June,  presenting full paper with study of impact over time

Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-Based Community Technology

by Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D. on May 04, 2009

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Measuring the Impact of Third Place Attachment on the Adoption of a Place-Based Community Technology — Presentation Transcript