Mapping happiness: my iPhone app/research project
mappiness.org.uk
mappiness.org.uk
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).
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 ;)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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..
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.