sinéad's lifestream

As part of the M.Sc. in Cyberpsychology I conducted a research study focusing on Irish bloggers and Irish internet users that read blogs. A third of this research involved an extensive review of past psychological research on blogging, collating available statistical data with regard to Irish internet user behaviours and information regarding Irish blogging. Based on this detailed literature review and extensive consultation with both bloggers and non-bloggers a questionnaire was created and in January of this year the survey was published online, gathering 422 participants – 244 bloggers and 178 non-bloggers.

This research is the first to investigate the psychological areas of interest surrounding blogging applied to an Irish audience, and is the first in-depth study of Irish blog authors; additionally it is the first study of Irish blog readers. The results constitute an additional step toward understanding Irish bloggers, and suggests only slight differences between those who blog and those who read blogs but do not blog themselves. Based on the results gathered additional studies with regard to any cultural differences between Irish bloggers and international ones could be ascertained. The strengths of this study lie in its large sample size and the flexibility of the questionnaire itself, where participants had the option of inputting rich qualitative data.

The overall aim of this research was to explore the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of Irish bloggers and non-blogging Irish internet users that read blogs. Attitudes to the issues surrounding blogging – trust, honesty, liability, privacy and permanence, were explored. Writer’s behaviours with regard to identity, motivations, and socialisation were investigated. Perceptions of the credibility and popularity of blogging in Ireland in comparison to other countries was investigated, and readership behaviours – frequency and origin of blogs read, were examined.

Over the next few days I will be publishing summaries of the most interesting findings, and the entire research document is now available via email request.

Though I had planned on publishing the document online I am currently writing a journal article for possible publication and therefore must wait until this process is complete before publishing the entire document online.  Participants that requested to be contacted when this research was available online will be contacted when all of the blog posts related to this research are published here.

An abstract (a very short summary) of the research is available here.

Irish Blog Research 2009, Survey Closes

Thank you to everyone that filled out my research survey. The response rate was double what I had hoped for and I’m really looking forward to analysing the data. Thank you so much to everyone that posted links to the survey on their own blogs, who retweeted it on twitter and emailed it to their friends. Thanks to Sabrina Dent for all her great ideas ideas (that definitely worked!), to all my tweeties that helped pilot study the survey and thanks to Irishblogs.ie for highlighting the research for me.

As Promised, Prizes at the end of the Rainbow

The winner of the first €50 voucher prize draw is Claire of Gingerpixel Photography.

The winner of the second €50 voucher prize draw is Barry James of Redbird Property & Maintenance. Who also has, quite possibly, the best twitter picture I’ve ever seen.

Irish Blog Research 2009, Survey Goes Live

As part of the M.Sc Cyberpsychology at IADT each postgraduate student is currently in the process of conducting a major research project. My own is focused on blogging, but from an Irish perspective, looking at the attitudes and behaviour of Irish bloggers and Irish blog readers. (Related Article)

Online Survey

At the very heart of this research study is an online survey which you can find here. I’m hoping to recruit a large sample of both bloggers and non-blogging readers. If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you fit into one of these categories and would very much appreciate it if you could spare 10-15 minutes to fill out the survey. Most of the questions are multiple choice, a small number are essay based but you can write as much, or as little as you like. This questionnaire is 100% anonymous, confidential and for research purposes only.  Even your IP address won’t be stored.

Prize Draws!

At the end of the survey you will have the opportunity to enter a prize draw for either a €50 Amazon voucher or a €50 Ticketmaster voucher – if you win, you can choose either prize.

I’m also going to run a separate prize draw for another €50 voucher for anyone that posts a link to this survey on their blog, or on a messageboard – anywhere really! To enter this separate draw just leave a comment on this blog post, this can be in the form of a trackback or a comment telling me where you have posted the link.

Thank You!

Thank you in advance for your help, without the Irish blogging community on my side this research won’t be complete. The hard part will be finding non-blogging readers to complete the survey, so if you know anyone that would fit that category please pass the link for the survey onto them.

As a way of giving something back to the blogging community I will be publishing summaries of the most interesting findings here on this blog. If you would like to be notified when the entire research document is available for download  – this will be a masters thesis of approximately 15,000 words, with an introduction to the psychogical aspects of blogging – you can enter your details on this form.

My current assignment for the Applied Cyberpsychology module is to develop a wiki. Which I finished working on last night. The criteria was that it had to in some way incorporate a topic in organisational or educational psychology. So I decided to create a wiki for students, that taught them about group work and also how to best use the Internet as a tool for collaborating online. I called it Project Spaces and you can find it here.

At first I was against the idea of creating a wiki by myself, and argued with the lecturer with regard to this. Part of this project involves asking the target audience (i.e. students) to view the wiki, and ask them about it’s usefulness. It was suggested that the individuals that were invited to view the wiki would naturally add content to it, and thus the wiki would mature. What I’ve actually found is that I might have done too much work and have been told that it reads like a complete wiki. I hadn’t expected that, but I guess I’ll just have to write that into my reflective essay.

There’s a big emphasis on the importance of public speaking when you’re studying in college, despite the fact that you don’t often get the opportunity to speak in front of anyone else but your classmates. Which is something I had to do on Saturday morning to a mixed crowd of 1st and 2nd year M.Sc Cyberpsychology students, and lecturers who were there to grill and grade.

I don’t suffer from anxiety or panic when it comes to public speaking. Admittedly, I get nervous, palms do sweat and cue cards get shuffled compulsively. But after the point of introducing myself I often feel like I’m having an out of body experience, like I’ve no control over what’s happening, my mouth is a tap and words are dripping out, fast. On Saturday I felt this more acutely than ever before, despite the fact that I’ve presented at a conference to twice as many people and just recently presented a report to the managing director of a company (and his posse of suits) I was hoping to work with.

The experience I had on Saturday consisted of my mind tricking myself into believing I had completely fucked up the presentation, that I’d skipped slides and mumbled incoherently. But on the outside, according to those who watched, I was cool, calm and collected. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have believed them but then I was reminded of the presentation we did last year. As with all our college presentations they are filmed for the external examiners. The video of last years presentation was shown in the Psychology lab a few weeks ago, watching it I felt like it was a different person on the screen. The girl on that video was an alternative universe me, knowledgeable, confident, calm and capable of handling the most difficult of questions.

I’m my biggest critic. I feel like I have to be, because I know that the people who love me could never point out my flaws for me. So despite my supposed calm exterior whilst presenting, afterwards I always feel like I could have done better, and that I should have been more in control. I think that’s an important thing to share, because I know so many people freak out over public speaking, especially when their time slot is straight after someone that seemed so confident and together.

No one is immune to the pressure that comes with public speaking, some people are just better at hiding it.

Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT) are in the process of recruiting for the fifth year of the Create Digital Media business training and mentoring programme. Create seeks to train and mentor 10 entrepreneurs/employees of small companies on a part-time basis, for one day every month. It’s a 12-month government-financed programme that will train participants in further developing their digital media companies and they are particularly interested in individuals involved in e-commerce, online advertising, mobile media and social media.

Create also offers incubation desk space at the Media Cube on the IADT campus or at the Digital Hub in Dublin City Centre and each selected individual will be assigned an average of €10,000 for customised training and mentoring in business skills related to digital media development of companies, services and products. For more information, visit www.createireland.ie.

Having studied at IADT for 5 years I can’t recommend it enough to prospective students. I’ve always found the college overflowing with highly skilled, extremely engaging and approachable lecturers, who make the learning process effortless. IADT also offer a part-time post graduate programme in Digital Media, the MA/MSc in Digital Media which is currently taking applications.

At the start of March I seemed pretty intent on beginning an ambitious post graduate research paper on trust formation online. Since then I have done extensive research into the topic and had to narrow down my research area, this is of course due to time/resource constraints (and the discovery of a very similar study published just recently).

Whilst researching trust online, I was quite drawn to all of the research on blogs. The deeper I researched it on an international level (looking at American, Japanese and European literature) the more I realised how interesting it was that as a nation we have not embraced it. Especially considering the overwhelming statistics: In 2007 it was estimated that there were between 50 and 85 million blogs and at their current rate of growth, by 2010 there will be over 500 million blogs. Yet, it has been estimated that there are only about 3,000 or 4,000 Irish bloggers, in comparison to the 12 million bloggers in American or the 8 million bloggers in Japan. Even in the IT industry in Ireland, there is a severe lack of business blogging, despite the obvious benefits.

However, recent statistics published by Amárach claims that almost one in five Irish Internet users have started or contributed to a blog in the past year and if you look at the Alexa.com rankings, Blogger.com is the 10th most visited site by Irish Internet Users. Are there thousands more Irish bloggers out there? That are just unconnected to the blogosphere. Research has shown that some blogs are simply more connected to a blogosphere than others, with some not being connected at all. Or are Irish Internet Users bigger readers than writers? Research has shown that people are less likely to pay attention to a medium perceived as not being credible, and according to some reports trust in blogging in on the decrease (in Ireland) yet other reports show that the majority of Irish Internet users trust consumer opinions posted online.

There is a lot of conflicting data out there. So, naturally I’m fascinated.

I’ll be surveying Irish Internet Users (specifically bloggers and blog readers) to investigate their attitudes, perceptions and motivations, and comparing the results to existing international research. In order to interpret these results, I will also be applying existing social psychology, computer mediated communications and human computer interaction literature.

I’ll also be looking into issues of credibility, liability and the business implications (both positive and negative).

Any thoughts?

IADT are holding an open evening for prospective post graduate and mature students on this coming Thursday, the 24th of April. All the information is available here.

If anyone has an interest in the Cyberpsychology masters (or any of the IADT courses) the open evening would be the place to go. Especially since the course coordinator Dr. Grainne Kirwan will be there to answer all your questions, and so will some of the students from the course. If by any chance you cannot make it and still have an interest, I would be more than willing to answer any questions in the comments of this post.

In two weeks time I’m off to Limerick to attend the Congress of Psychology Students – this is an annual event where undergraduate and postgraduate psychology students (and sometimes their supervisors) present the research that they have conducted, usually in the last year or two. At this event two years ago I presented my own research, and plan on doing so once again at next year’s congress.

The congress is a wonderful opportunity to gather information about the current direction of Irish psychological research and based on the information from the timetable for presentations it appears that the majority of the research to be presented is coming from the traditional mainstream topics of scientific psychology. From almost 200 presentations taking place only about 10 of these are related to I.T in some way, which personally is a big disappointment, especially considering the ubiquity of communications technologies in Ireland and the number of I.T companies based here.

Applying psychological studies to technology has always been a niche in this country, which is surprising because it has so many positive and negative impacts upon Irish working life, home life, education etc. It is something that I feel passionately about, especially the importance of applying scientific methods to research in I.T – rather than the current climate of unreliable surveys and the media shaping public knowledge and ideas about how we use and interact with one another through technology.

I did however note an increase in the areas of research related to gay men and lesbians (though it is still a tiny percentage of the 200 presentations). There are of course many other areas of research that I have an interest in and below is a list of the selected presentations which I will aiming to attend.

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The PermanentTSB website won a Golden Spider back in 2005 and since then hasn’t really changed it’s overall site design, infact, it has been virtually the same since 2002. A heuristic evalution of the site (undertaken in the Human Computer Interaction module of the MSc in Cyberpsychology) easily leads me to believe that it is in dire need of a redesign (yet their more recently launched “Yourmortgage.ie” is almost a replica of the main site). Out of a possible 23 heuristics, it only fully complied with 12 of them – meaning the site is littered with design inconsistencies, broken links, very clearly deviates from the current standard web practices (PDF files? really?) etc., etc.

It’s just another fine example of Irish web design firmly stuck in web 1.0. The .ie domain is virtually (no pun intended!) littered with them. I’m sure there are plenty more examples of badly designed Irish sites (not necessarily .ie) and would be thrilled to hear everyone’s own personal “favorites”.

Eircom.net is another firm favorite of mine for its sensational orange menu with white text, and dark grey text on a grey background for its sub-menu. Wonderful stuff.