Pollion - new smartphone data collection app

How can researchers and universities make better use of smartphones?

Programming dedicated apps for different research needs is costly both in the time and resources needed. It also requires deeper programming skills not always available to the average researcher.

Pollion, a new service for researchers, tries to answer this problem by providing a flexible data collection platform for different research needs. Pollion is able to collect deep behavioural data from respondents through short surveys and the smartphone's various sensors (e.g. GPS signal). This makes it possible to collect individuals' behaviour across geographic space for example.

Pollion can also be used for more elaborate designs using the day reconstruction method or simpler tasks such as getting instantaneous feedback from a study group (e.g. course evaluations).

Pollion will be launching across major smartphone operating systems soon. Get more information on the Pollion website.

January 5th Links

1. For those interested in maximum likelihood estimation techniques, Vincent Granville discusses the method of steepest ascent in relation to Google's search algorithm.

2. The Economist: "Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs."

3. U.S. Council of Graduate Schools: The Ph.D. Completion Project

4. Yesterday it was announced that Irish property prices fell back to 2002 levels in 2010, according to reports from MyHome.ie and Sherry Fitzgerald; so it is interesting to read this SSISI paper (2007) by P.J. Drudy which "argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the 'commodification' of housing".

5. The (U.K.) Royal Statistical Society "Get Stats" Campaign: 'giving everyone the skills and confidence to use numbers well'.

6. Researchers at Harvard have found a way of using the iPhone to measure people’s moods and have found a correlation between daydreaming and unhappiness.

7. The new Happiness Index to gauge Britain's national mood.

8. The regional impacts of Northern Irish HEIs.

9. Tom McKenzie and Dirk Sliwka: Universities as Stakeholders in their Students' Careers: On the Benefits of Graduate Taxes to Finance Higher Education.

10. CNN Money: Should companies offer sabbaticals?

11. Damien Mulley: "Failure" and Enterprise Culture in Ireland.

I-Phone Apps

If anyone has developed decent i-phone apps for doing surveys, please feel free to get in contact or put them on the comments section. At present, we are in the process of developing one for helping us conduct time discounting and related studies here in the Institute. I linked recently to the Mappiness app and I know a number of readers of the blog who started using it. The main barrier to using iphone apps at present is, of course, the limited penetration of iphones. However, as someone who has engaged in every conceivable form of survey work it is obvious to me that, if cost were not an issue, that the iphone is practically a perfect mode for conducting behavioural economics research and I am very interested to see the types of things that people develop. We are beginning work on an app that will work on any smart phone and will be used as an ajdunct to our internet survey panel work. This is still very limited in terms of coverage but a leap forward in terms of being able to do the type of experimental research "in the wild" that is really needed to develop empirical behavioural economics research.