[publication] Polling with Mobile Devices on University Campus

Our contribution about „Polling with Mobile Devices on University Campus“ is now published in the new book „Advances in Communications and Media Research„.
Abstract:

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, and they can be used in novel ways to improve or enhance existing use cases and offer new solutions for unsolved problems. One such use case is performing studies, questionnaires and polls. With their unique capabilities and sensors, mobile devices nowadays can contribute to those fields and even offer new ways of data analysis and methodologies.
The combination of technologies in just one device, namely the touchscreen, sensors, web-connectivity and build in GPS tracking, make them a perfect tool for different scenarios and contexts. Some of those, in particular touch-screen technology, can be found in the literature about computer assisted questionnaires and interviews, where the technology was found feasible and in a large number of cases even better accepted as classical methodologies like paper-and-pen questionnaires.
Drawing from those experiences, and with current trends in mobile development in mind, a prototype application for conducting interviews and questionnaires is developed. The main research question is, how the conjunction of automatically tracked geolocation data and questionnaires can be used in a scenario that examines quality of life on campuses across the university. By creating a heat map of location and questionnaire answers, dependencies can be visualized, making them easily detectable. It can be concluded that with the help of mobile devices questionnaires can be enhanced in an implicit way to give a deeper insight in dependencies according to the local places the questionnaires are happening (in our special case on university campus).

Reference: Andrasec, D., Ebner, M., Ebner, T. (2014) Polling with Mobile Devices on University Campus. Stavros, A.V. (ed.). Advances in Communications and Media Research. Nova Publisher, pp. 99-118