Youth Concerns and Responses to Self-Tracking Tools and Personal Informatics Systems

Abstract

Though some work has looked at the implementation of personal informatics tools with youth and in schools, the approach has been prescriptive; students are pushed toward behaviour change intervention or otherwise use the data for prescribed learning in a particular curriculum area. This has left a gap around how young people may themselves choose to use personal informatics tools in ways relevant to their own concerns. We gave workshops on personal informatics to 13 adolescents at two secondary schools in London, UK. We asked them to use a commercial personal informatics app to track something they chose that they thought might impact their learning. Our participants proved competent and versatile users of personal informatics tools. They tracked their feelings, tech activity, physical activity, and sleep with many using the process as a system for understanding and validating aspects of their own lives, rather than changing them.

What’s keeping teens up at night? Reflecting on sleep and technology habits with teens

“…Self-tracking studies with teens highlight particularly social concerns. In school settings, self-tracking with teens has highlighted identity and authority as key concerns, with self-tracking data providing a reference point for teens for their still-forming personal identities [9]. Materialist concerns, i.e.…”

“…One way to scale up such interactions is through workshops. Whilst workshops are often used to share and reflect on personal data collected [9,86,87], we contend that the SleepBeta cards can also work well in workshops where teens pair up with fellow teens to reflect on their sleep and decide what data they wish to explore. Alternatively, cards also hold potential to scaffold conversations around sleep in families, without a researcher present.…”

“…Likewise, reflective processes are often characterised as a dialogue [52]. Even in the context of personal informatics, reflection has been shown to be highly social, either through family networks [10], online social networks [73], school environments [9,86], data sharing workshops [87], and presentations of insights and personal experiences with peers [24,42].…”

“…However, our study highlights two novel aspects of reflection through social interaction. Firstly, a key difference in our study was that we focused on teens directly, rather than their families [73] or school classes [9,86] as whole. This is important, because adolescence as a life stage is characterised by a transition from being a dependent child towards being an independent adult [91].…”

“…Health research relies on teens as research subjects to providing data for large cohort studies into sleep [1][2][3][4], but neither teens nor parents are engaged in these studies to reflect on their own data and experiences. HCI research, on the other hand, often promotes engagement through a Quantified Self approach where teens or entire families are invited to track and quantify their exercise and sleep [8][9][10]. However, there is an inherent assumption in self-tracking research that the data will simply lead to reflection and action, with little consideration on how to initiate and support reflection.…”