Innovation or Violation? Leveraging Mobile Technology to Conduct Socially Responsible Community Research

Abstract

Mobile technology is increasingly being used to measure individuals' moods, thoughts, and behaviors in real time. Current examples include the use of smartphones to collect ecological momentary assessments (EMAs; assessments delivered "in the moment"); wearable technology to passively collect objective measures of participants' movement, physical activity, sleep, and physiological response; and smartphones and wearable devices with global positioning system (GPS) capabilities to collect precise information about where participants spend their time. Although advances in mobile technology offer exciting opportunities for measuring and modeling individuals' experiences in their natural environments, they also introduce new ethical issues. Drawing on lessons learned while collecting GPS coordinates and EMAs measuring mood, companionship, and health-risk behavior with a sample of low-income, predominantly racial/ethnic minority youth living in Chicago, this manuscript discusses ethical challenges specific to the methodology (e.g., unanticipated access to personal information) and broader concerns related to data conceptualization and interpretation (e.g., the ethics of "monitoring" low-income youth of color). While encouraging researchers to embrace innovations offered by mobile technology, this discussion highlights some of the many ethical issues that also need to be considered.

Complicating Narratives: Defining and Deconstructing Ethical Challenges in Community Psychology

“…To address these concerns, Kia‐Keating and her partners took a decidedly action‐oriented approach: they created a training on the ethics of participatory photography for the youth, which embodied CBPR values of sharing knowledge and respecting autonomy, so that participants could evaluate for themselves the risks and benefits of capturing different kinds of images and sharing personal information in online spaces. Similarly, Roy (2017*) used mobile technology (e.g., smart phones) with low‐income youth of Color to collect microlevel, ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of participants’ real‐time experiences. This method captures where youth spend their time in their communities, tracking their whereabouts via GPS, which can be compared to geospatial data on community crime, the location of alcohol and tobacco retailers, and other risky contexts.…”

Using Ecological Momentary Assessments to Understand Black Youths’ Experiences of Racism, Stress, and Safety

“…Although it is defensible to use youth report, it is possible that they stated that they were at school when they were somewhere else. It was a warranted limitation given the potential invasiveness of smart phone technology to capture data young people did not intend for the study (Roy, 2017). Another limitation was that there were very few reports from some types of activity spaces.…”

Sensing everyday activity: Parent perceptions and feasibility

“…Across disciplines, low income and minority populations are historically harder to recruit for participation in research than white affluent populations and can be mistrustful of researchers (Arora et al, 2014;Scharff et al, 2010). Mobile sensing technology may be less familiar to low-income racial and ethnic minorities and could thereby increase mistrust in the technology itself as well as with the research group collecting the information (Berridge, 2016;Roy, 2017). At the same time, systemic barriers that minority populations face, and the stressors associated with poverty (Jovanovski & Cook, 2019;Towne et al, 2015) make SENSING EVERYDAY ACTIVITY: PARENT PERCEPTIONS AND FEASIBILITY 14 low income and minority populations particularly high-risk for a range of maladaptive developmental outcomes (Hair et al, 2015;Gordon & Cui, 2018;Tobler et al, 2013).…”