

Mapping happiness: my iPhone app/research project - gmac
http://www.mappiness.org.uk

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gmac
Approved and in the App Store today, this is a major part of the data
collection for my PhD.

I'd be very grateful for feedback on all aspects of the website/app/broader
research. And if you'd like to download the app and take part, that would make
me especially happy!

It's similar to what psychologists call an Experience Sampling Method (ESM)
study, but where ESM usually asks a lot of questions of a small number of
people, I'm asking very few questions of a (hopefully!) large number.

Plus, of course, I'm using GPS and GIS.

(Note: I'm well aware that iPhone users and Hacker News readers are not 100%
representative of the general population, but the richness and novelty of the
data I hope to collect mean I can live with this).

~~~
eelco
Love the idea. Too bad that I'm not in the UK.

If you'd made a (very similar) Android app as well, you could have tested if
the use of a certain mobile OS makes a significant difference in happiness ;)

~~~
gmac
Yes, I'd like to have done that, it's just a question of the time it would
take to learn a new development language/framework (and the money it would
take to buy an appropriate testing device).

~~~
portlandFan12
Your time is of course the major expense involved in supporting a new
platform.

That is especially true of supporting Android, because Android development is
free, and you don't need to buy any hardware to test your application. For
simple apps like yours the Android SDK's emulator is very accurate and runs on
Windows/Mac/Linux. (See <http://developer.android.com/sdk/> )

The only money you would need to pay is when you want to publish your
application on the Android market. It costs around US $25 to become a
registered developer.

For other people considering cross-platform mobile development, for simple
apps, one way to keep costs down is to use one of the approved-by-Apple cross-
platform development environments.

The one I've used is called PhoneGap, but I think there are others.

You write your program in JavaScript/HTML5, and it is run in WebKit on all
mobile OS's that support WebKit. (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, WebOS).

PhoneGap isn't exactly polished, and it's not quite write-once run-anywhere,
but it is still probably the fastest route to getting a simple app up on
multiple mobile platforms.

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liedra
What a cute idea. I'd help out a fellow academic, but I don't have an iPhone
:(

I liked your page on how the data will be used too. Seems like you've put a
lot of thought into privacy and stuff. Good job!

Good luck & it'll be interesting to see what sort of data you uncover!

~~~
famousactress
Interesting point. I suppose the thesis will be on how happy iPhone owners are
in certain places. I'll be curious about how the Apple Stores rank :|

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aantix
I love this sampling method. I've read both _Exploring Inner Experience_ and
_Describing Inner Experience_ by Russel T. Hurlburt and found myself thinking
several times "This has so many applications!"

E.g. say someone doesn't know whether to break up with their significant other
or not. We could write a web app, let's call it _The Ambivalence Therapist_
that would ping them several times a day asking "What are you thinking at this
exact moment" and if they're thinking of their significant other, "How are you
feeling towards that person?" Then you could chart how often they're
ruminating over the relationship and whether the feelings are positive or
negative.

It's a superior method to just a standard questionnaire asking "How do you
feel about your relationship?" since most users would only respond with their
most recent emotions.

~~~
todayiamme
I was thinking along those lines too, but your solution is a bit too invasive.

Instead, what if we analyzed the peripheral data generated by a person and ask
them to tag something to it in the app? There's this project called stereomood
(see: <http://www.stereomood.com/>) that's doing something similar. The thing
is that people tend to do certain _groups_ of behaviors in certain moods.

So, if you can associate the two and _then_ ask for confirmation or a response
along those lines. You can subtly check on them without influencing them. If
we ask them a question in these lines then we tend to get false feedback. Even
if they aren't feeling that way we might trigger a response and _make_ them
feel that way subconsciously. Or, even worse we might become an annoyance and
that person might stop replying properly to us. Bad data is to expected but it
must be minimized.

Even cooler would be to mine this data further and create a profile of the
person. So, that their psychiatrist/psychologist/counselor can better help
them. After all there's only so much you can say in the span of an hour.

I wouldn't be surprised that a startup comes up trying to do just that.

~~~
aantix
I like where you're going with this.

Have you ever explored the IAT (Implicit Association Test) at Harvard's site?
( <https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/> ) The IAT "is an experimental
method within social psychology designed to measure the strength of automatic
association between mental representations of objects." (Wikipedia).

Pictures could be pulled from Facebook of the user with his/her significant
other and pictures without the significant other. And then the app could have
the user run through an IAT-like test where their associations of those images
to both positive/negative words is measured. Possibly this could give some
sort of indication of the sentiment towards the significant other vs being
single..

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xinsight
Looks like an elegant app for data collection. As for your methodology, I'm
wondering how much you'll be able to conclude. For example, there will
probably be a high correlation of people are relaxed and in a park, but does
that mean that parks make people relaxed? It could be that people take a
break, relax and then go to the park.

~~~
gmac
Well, to some extent that's inevitably going to be true.

But we do ask some control questions, including what people have been doing.
So we can see if people feel differently when they answer that they're
"Sleeping, resting, relaxing" in the park versus when they're doing the same
activity elsewhere.

