Unobtrusive Measures Research Articles

From Brochures to Videos to Counseling: Exposure to HIV-Prevention Programs

This research tested the prediction that reading a preventive brochure leads people to watch a preventive video, and that watching this video in turn leads to an increase in the likelihood of participating in a preventive counseling session. A sample of men and women from a southeastern community in the United States was recruited for a general health survey with the objective of examining participation in HIV-prevention interventions. Unobtrusive measures of exposure to HIV-prevention brochures, an HIV-prevention video, and an HIV-prevention counseling session were obtained. Findings indicated that reading the brochures increased watching the video and that watching the video increased participation in the counseling session. The association between exposure to the video and exposure to the counseling was mediated by expectations that the counseling would be useful. Findings are discussed in terms of the need to ensure exposure to interventions to achieve intervention effectiveness.

Automatic Assessment of Situation Awareness from Electronic Mail Communication: Analysis of the Enron Dataset

Over the past two decades, “situation awareness” (SA) has graduated from a Human Factors construct to a mainstream term in domains as diverse as aviation, medicine, and defense. Individuals involved in design, training, and policy consider SA a critical aspect of the success of their organizations. Given this prominence, accurate measures of SA should be primary indications of organizational performance. However, many traditional measures of SA disrupt the flow of work; they are poorly suited for operational organizations. Alternative methods of SA measurement are needed if accurate feedback is to be given to team members in working conditions. In this effort, we explore the potential of unobtrusive process measures of SA. These measures are based on analyses of the electronic communications media prevalent in modern networked organizations.

It's All about Me: Narcissistic Chief Executive Officers and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance

This study uses unobtrusive measures of the narcissism of chief executive officers (CEOs)—the prominence of the CEO's photograph in annual reports, the CEO's prominence in press releases, the CEO's use of first-person singular pronouns in interviews, and compensation relative to the second-highest-paid firm executive—to examine the effect of CEO narcissism on a firm's strategy and performance. Results of an empirical study of 111 CEOs in the computer hardware and software industries in 1992–2004 show that narcissism in CEOs is positively related to strategic dynamism and grandiosity, as well as the number and size of acquisitions, and it engenders extreme and fluctuating organizational performance. The results suggest that narcissistic CEOs favor bold actions that attract attention, resulting in big wins or big losses, but that, in these industries, their firms' performance is generally no better or worse than firms with non-narcissistic CEOs.

Unobtrusive measures

This ninth article in the Performance Technologist's Toolbox series explores the data collection method of unobtrusive measures, which offer a diverse set of tools to reduce measurement reactivity. Their application in performance technology is outlined, the advantages and disadvantages of employing unobtrusive measures are summarized, and several basic guidelines are provided for their use.

Exploring Eye Tracking Measures to Understand Operator Performance

Eye tracker technology is a growing and viable source for more sensitive, unobtrusive, and objective measures of operator performance and cognitive state. Several eye movement metrics have been validated in the empirical literature, but caution is advised when linking low level eye movements (e.g., fixations) to high level cognitive constructs (e.g., workload). Valid analysis of eye movement data is vulnerable to output interpretation, metric granularity, and incomplete views of operator performance. To address these issues, more research is needed to exploit contextual information from other performance measures, identify metric deficiencies, and develop useful composite measures. Individual eye movement metrics alone provide an insufficient picture of operator cognition and performance, but when purposefully combined with other metrics (e.g., other physiological sensor data), offer a more comprehensive look at operator performance. Understanding why operator errors occur can help researchers identify information-processing bottlenecks, possibly allowing designers to find ways to improve performance.

Success Is All in the Measures: Androgenousness, Curvaceousness, and Starring Frequencies in Adult Media Actresses

The debate of whether body-mass index (BMI) or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is the primary visual cue to female physical attractiveness (FPA) has generated considerable interest. However, experiments addressing this question typically have limited ecological validity and do not capture the ultimate goal of FPA, which is to elicit male sexual arousal. Hence, using an unobtrusive measures design, we retrieved movie and magazine starring frequencies of 125 adult media actresses from a company's database, operationalized starring frequencies as FPA measures, and tested their relationship to actresses' anthropometric data. Low BMI was related to frequent movie starring, while WHR, waist-to-bust ratio (WBR), and bust size were not. Conversely, low WHR, low WBR, and larger bust size were related to frequent magazine starring, while BMI was not. Visual cues to FPA might be domain-specific, with androgenousness cues salient for attractiveness evaluation of moving bodies and curvaceousness cues salient for posing bodies.

Assessing the College Classroom with Unobtrusive Measures

This paper suggests ways to expand opportunities for evaluating the college course. While exams and papers are useful, an over-dependence on them is problematic because their overt nature allows for factors other than learning (cheating, test taking strategies, attitudes) to impact assessment results. As such, we recommend the addition of unobtrusive measures to assessing what happens in the college classroom because they provide balance to the results derived from more traditional measures. The discussion includes examples of physical trace, archival, and observation sources of unobtrusive measures of student learning outcomes.

Implementation of a Comprehensive Schoolwide Behavioral Intervention: The ABC Program

The Academic and Behavioral Competencies (ABC) Program, a schoolwide program to reduce classroom disruption and encourage rule following, academic task completion, and homework completion, is described. The program was initially developed and implemented in an elementary school with a high-risk population. Data from teachers, parents, and children indicate high levels of satisfaction with the program. In addition, unobtrusive measures of program impact, reported as reductions in referrals to the principal’s office, suspensions, and increases in homework completion rates relative to the year prior to implementation of the program, suggest a preliminary positive impact of the program. A replication is reported for another school district, with teacher evaluations of satisfaction and effectiveness reported, supporting the flexibility and adaptability of the program. Although the present article does not constitute a systematic evaluation of the ABC Program, it presents preliminary data on the process of implementation and stakeholder satisfaction.

The borrowers: library records as unobtrusive measures of children's reading preferences

This paper explores whether analysis of school library borrowing records can reveal any insights into the reading habits of junior age children. Data in the form of computerised library‐borrowing records were collected from a cohort of 90 Year 6 (age 10–11 years) children over the full course of the academic year. Two‐thirds of the cohort were boys. The paper will consider what light these data can throw on children's reading preferences as they evolve over time in specific social settings. The data stem from a project that combined both qualitative and quantitative research methods in innovative ways.

Slash fiction and human mating psychology

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography, both multibillion dollar global industries, underscore how different male and female erotic fantasies actually are. These differences reflect the different selection pressures males and females faced over human evolutionary history and highlight the utility of using unobtrusive measures to study aspects of human nature. Salmon & Symons (2001) examined slash (the depiction of a romantic or sexual relationship between typically heterosexual male television protagonists, such as Kirk and Spockfrom Star Trek) as an erotic genre, placing it in the context of romance and female sexual psychology. The topic is revisited here with attention also being paid to slash between two female television characters and the appeal to people of fiction in general.

Non-conscious forms of system justification: Implicit and behavioral preferences for higher status groups

According to system justification theory, people internalize and perpetuate systemic forms of inequality, even though it sometimes means harboring preferences for members of higher status outgroups. In Study 1, students from a high status (but not a low status) university exhibited significant ingroup favoritism on the IAT, an automatic evaluative measure. Furthermore, for students at the high status university, implicit ingroup bias was positively correlated with implicit self-esteem. For students at the low status university, implicit acceptance of consensual stereotypes concerning academic and extracurricular characteristics was associated with implicit outgroup favoritism. In Study 2, Latinos and Asian Americans exhibited significant outgroup favoritism on an unobtrusive behavioral measure by choosing White interaction partners over members of their own groups. In Study 3, parents named newborn children disproportionately after their fathers (compared with their mothers) and published birth announcements for boys slightly more often than for girls. Thus, we observed evidence of system justification on implicit or unobtrusive measures in three different socially disadvantaged groups.

Public intervention in the entrepreneurial process

In this paper we discuss three Norwegian cases of public programmes aimed at enhancing entrepreneurship at the regional/local level. The cases provide insight into a wide range of public initiatives implemented by the authorities such as education, consultancy, and financial stimuli. The programmes have been subjected to relatively comprehensive evaluations. In these evaluations, and also in most other evaluations of public means aimed at stimulating entrepreneurs, some important questions related to the effects on business creation and on the long term social impact of the interventions still remain to be answered. In order to overcome the problems, future research should apply longitudinal and comparative studies and use unobtrusive measures. We also discuss a theoretical framework in which entrepreneurship programmes can be interpreted and applied as a tool to improve such initiatives. Central elements in this framework are the concepts of human, social and financial capital.

Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization.

Previous studies have established that people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and do so via computational processes that appear to be both automatic and mandatory. If true, this conclusion would be important, because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race. Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.

Review of Understanding psychological research: An introduction to methods.

RICHARD ST. JEAN Understanding Psychological Research: An Introduction to Methods Toronto, ON: Prentice Hall Canada, 2001, 192 pages (ISBN 0-13-027027-X, C$41.95, Softcover) Reviewed by URSULA HESS Richard St. Jean's book has the stated goal to be a brief text that presents essential concepts in a concise but interesting format. In this the author succeeds admirably. The nine short chapters and three appendices present the basic content that any method course needs to cover. The chapters are centred around lively research examples, often from the author's own work. Each chapter is followed by a brief summary and a glossary of key terms. The examples are used to introduce the methodological question and to illustrate various solutions. The first chapter presents a brief overview of fundamental concepts. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss ways to measure dependent variables using observational and selfreport techniques. The chapter on self-reports gives an excellent overview of the methodological bases of survey research; unfortunately, it remains silent on the use of self-reports in other contexts. This choice has the consequence that the important issue of the psychometric characteristics of self-report measures such as psychological tests are addressed only in passing in the introduction. Chapters 4 to 8 focus on different research plans. These chapters present research examples that are used to illustrate possible sources of confounds and biases and to propose solutions. An interesting feature is the relatively extensive treatment of archival research and unobtrusive measures presented under the heading of expost facto research. These techniques, although infrequently used by psychologists, allow St. Jean to sensitize the reader to the problems related to proper operationalization and validity of measures. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on between- and within-subjects designs. St. Jean succeeds in presenting a fairly complete description of the approaches in only about 20 pages each, and even manages to include a short but helpful introduction to the use of analysis of variance in these contexts. Chapter 7 is an equally successful primer on interaction effects. This is a definite strength of the book. Interactions are always a difficult notion to grasp for students when first confronted with the concept, and methods texts tend to ignore the issue and leave them to statistics texts, which in turn focus on how to calculate rather than to interpret interactions. St Jean's short introduction not only shows clearly how to interpret the common patterns of two-way interactions, but only provides in the process sufficient background for students to be able to grasp more complex interactive patterns. …

Unobtrusive measurement: using police information for forensic research

This article explores how unobtrusive research methods popularized by Webb et al. (1966) can be utilized in forensic research. In particular, the value of the approach is considered with special reference to examining investigative processes and criminal behaviour. Webb et al.’s three non-reactive types of unobtrusive measures (physical traces, archival material and simple observation) are discussed in relation to a variety of types of material collected across the course of police enquiries. The breadth and variation of this material is emphasized with special consideration of its utility for research. We illustrate how the limitations and benefits identified by Webb et al. are echoed within the forensic domain and how close attention to the methods of collecting such material developed by researchers may improve the effectiveness of investigations.

Prejudice Versus Discrimination in the Employment Interview: We may Hire Equally, but Our Memories Harbour Prejudice

The effects of applicant race and applicant quality on recall errors and on decision making in the employment interview were examined. Eighty-eight white undergraduates in the mid-Western United States reviewed paper credentials and then interviewed a high or low quality black or white applicant in a controlled experimental setting. Results showed that, although the interviewers hired the black and white applicants in equal proportion, one week later they recalled the answers to the interview questions given by the black applicants as having been significantly less intelligent then those of whites - when in fact the actual interview content in the two race conditions was identical. Presumably, the participants of this study had negative schemas towards blacks that they were able to suppress when making hiring decisions, but that were revealed when unobtrusive measures were used.

Adaptation and sensitivity to postural change in sitting.

We used 3 psychophysics methods to determine perceptible changes in seat height, seat pan angle, and backrest angle using an experimental chair. In the method of adjustment, the chosen chair settings were affected by the initial setting. For example, a high initial setting of the seat height led to a high selected setting and a low setting led to a low value. The difference between settings was referred to as not noticeable difference (NND). The method of limits was used to determine acceptable chair settings using verbal limits such as "too high" and "too low." Using the method of constant stimuli, just noticeable differences (JNDs) were determined for chair height (1.5 cm), seat pan angle (1.2 degrees) and backrest angle (1.7 degrees). The corresponding values for NNDs and verbal limits were about twice as large: chair height (2.5 cm), seat pan angle (4 degrees) and backrest angle (3 degrees). NNDs and verbal limits are unobtrusive measures that are considered more valid than JNDs, which exaggerate the need for adjustability. The results have practical implications for the design of office chairs.

Choosing Effective Evaluation Methods

s a practitioner, you have been convincedthat you should evaluate your program. Youhave talked with stakeholders about whatpurposes they have for the evaluation. Stake-holders and evaluators have agreed on the elements andpurpose of the program to be evaluated as well as thepriority questions to be answered. You have focusedthe evaluation and determined an evaluation design.Now it is time to select appropriate methods for obtain-ing evaluation information.The many possible methodologies make it diffi-cult for the practitioner to choose. The focus of this is-sue’s column is on identification of basic types of data-gathering strategies, strengths and weaknesses of each,and variables to consider in making choices.TWO ISSUES IN DATA COLLECTIONThere are at least two issues that form recurringthemes in evaluation and should be discussed here. Thefirst is the use of quantitative and qualitative data col-lection methods (Bernard, 1998; Green & Lewis, 1986;Patton, 1990; Shadish, Cook, & Leviton, 1991). All de-bates about these issues aside for the moment, each ap-proach has advantages for answering certain kinds ofquestions. Table 1 has some detailed information aboutthe advantages and disadvantages of qualitative andquantitative measures. An upcoming article in thisEvaluation in Practice column will discuss that atgreater length. Most of the suggested types of measuresdiscussed here will be a mix of qualitative (e.g., focusgroupinterviewsorfieldobservations)andquantitative(e.g., physiological measures and questionnaires)measures.The second is the use of obtrusive and nonobtrusivemeasures (Bernard, 1998; Shadish et al., 1991). Obtru-sive measures are those that are completed in the open,or in plain view, and with the direct knowledge of theparticipants. Unobtrusive measures are those that aredone in the absence of direct awareness by participants,althoughtheydonotprecludepriorknowledgeandper-mission by participants. Obtrusive measures might in-clude surveys and diaries. Unobtrusive measures mightinclude key informant interviews, as well as direct ob-servation of public behaviors.STRATEGIES FOR GATHERING EVALUATION DATAAlthough a myriad of data-gathering methods andvariationsexists,itmaybehelpfultobeginbygroupingthem according to obtrusive (interactive) and unobtru-sive (noninteractive) methods. A data-gathering methodmayinvolveactualmeasurementoraskingquestionsofpeople in an interactive way, or obtaining informationwithout direct participant input. Consideration shouldalso be given to whether qualitative, quantitative, ormixed-method approaches are best for the situation.Physiological MeasuresPerhaps the most objective means of gathering eval-uation information is to take direct physiological mea-surements of individuals (Cooper, Heron, & Heward,1987;Green&Lewis,1986).Forexample,measuresofthe effectiveness of a 6-month fitness walking programmight include blood pressure, serum cholesterol, andrecovery heart rate. A program designed to improve thehealth status of newborns may include measuring thebirth weight of all infants born to mothers involved inan experimental program or control group. Althoughdirect physiological measures can provide clear quanti-

Community Research: The Lost Art of Unobtrusive Methods1

The use of unobtrusive methods, with special reference to community‐oriented research, is a lost art, despite their strong recommendation by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest (1966) as means of supplementing reactive measures. The decline of unobtrusive measures seems to be related to the increased popularity and adherence to the doctrine of informed consent, the decrease in use of deception as a method, and the effort to conceptualize research subjects as cooperative participants. While the distaste for unobtrusive methods seems to reflect increased sensitivity toward ethics in research, the collection of partially reliable and partially valid knowledge continues, with considerable reliance on reactive measures.

Are the MMPI subtle subscales subtle measures of their scales?

This study investigated the ability of the MMPI Wiener-Harmon subtle subscales (on scales D. Hy, Pd, Pa, and Ma) to serve as subtle or unobtrusive measures of their scales. Forty outpatients completed the MMPI under standard instructions, followed by a fake-good or fake-bad instructional set. First, we investigated the paradoxical effect found in the MMPI faking literature (in which, overall, the subtle subscale T-scores change in a direction opposite of the faking instructions) and found that not every subtle subscale shows this effect. Secondly, the subtle subscale T-scores achieved under faking conditions showed no significant relationship to their respective full-scale T-scores achieved under standard conditions. Therefore, our results do not support the Wiener-Harmon subtle subscales as subtle measures of their scales.