The research lab in your pocket
28 July 2011
Apps created by and for the academy could turn smartphones into essential academic tools for everything from teaching and citations to social-science fieldwork. Sarah Cunnane reports
Credit: Bruno Mallart/Getty
When George MacKerron set out to investigate how people's happiness is affected by their environment, he hit upon the idea of using mobile phones. What if an application could be developed to ask study participants - at regular intervals - how they were feeling, where they were and who they were with?
The research project Mappiness does just that via an app that beeps phone owners once or more a day to enquire about their state of mind while simultaneously taking a noise measurement and tracking the participant's location with global positioning system technology. Richard Layard, the British economist and Labour peer known for his research on well-being, has described the project as "a revolutionary research idea", but for MacKerron, the concept was obvious.
"The technology was there: it seemed a no-brainer," says the PhD researcher ....
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