Abstract
Wearable sensors are becoming increasingly popular in organizational research. Although validation studies that examine sensor data in conjunction with established social and psychological constructs are becoming more frequent, they are usually limited for two reasons: first, most validation studies are carried out under laboratory settings. Only a handful of studies have been carried out in real-world organizational environments. Second, for those studies carried out in field settings, reported findings are derived from a single case only, thus seriously limiting the possibility of studying the influence of contextual factors on sensor-based measurements. This article presents a validation study of expressive and instrumental ties across nine relatively small R&D teams. The convergent validity of Bluetooth (BT) detections is reported for friendship and advice-seeking ties under three organizational contexts: research labs, private companies, and university-based teams. Results show that, in general, BT detections correlated strongly with self-reported measurements. However, the organizational context affects both the strength of the observed correlation and its direction. Whereas advice-seeking ties generally occur in close spatial proximity and are best identified in university environments, friendship relationships occur at a greater spatial distance, especially in research labs. We conclude with recommendations for fine-tuning the validity of sensor measurements by carefully examining the opportunities for organizational embedding in relation to the research question and collecting complementary data through mixed-method research designs.
Highlights
Wearable sensors are providing exciting new research opportunities for the social sciences
In order to remove spurious detections, we identify outliers based on the interquartile range (IQR) of the collected data, which ranges from -83 to -71, with a median Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) value of -78 for all nine teams
Following the proposed heuristic for advice-seeking relationships holds across all three organizational contexts: correlation coefficients are at their respective maximum at a stronger and narrow range of RSSI levels for the university, research lab and company-based teams
Summary
Wearable sensors are providing exciting new research opportunities for the social sciences. Following up on initial technical developments to miniaturize and combine several sensor technologies into wearable devices in the first decade of the 21st century, interested scholars have invested considerable effort in assessing the validity and reliability of the resulting data (Chaffin et al, 2017; Chen & Miller, 2017; Elmer et al, 2019; Kayhan et al, 2018). These initial studies relied mainly on laboratory experiments to assess the. This article addresses this problem by analyzing and comparing wearable sensor data among nine relatively small research and development (R&D) teams
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