Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 18, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 10, 2024 - Mar 6, 2024
Date Accepted: Apr 24, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Remote participation of vulnerable user groups: Navigating the post-COVID research landscape for more inclusive design
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for innovation in remote user-centered research methods, particularly through an extended use of video conferencing such as Zoom for remote user involvement.
Objective:
This paper aims to explore opportunities and considerations that emerged from involving vulnerable user groups remotely in designing behavioral and psychological interventions.
Methods:
A retrospective case analysis was conducted using a reflection-on-action approach. Remote user-centered research practices from two projects were examined, involving vulnerable populations in Norway and Australia. These projects engaged low-income/unemployed groups in synchronous user-based evaluation and testing to develop interactive and web-based behavioral interventions. Visual mapping and reflection-on-action revealed opportunities and considerations of adopting remote participatory research with vulnerable users.
Results:
Lessons learned for future research were identified as 1) Reduced barriers to research inclusion, 2) Digital literacy transition, 3) Contextualized insights: A window into people’s lives, 4) Seamless enactment of roles and 5) Increased flexibility for researchers and participants.
Conclusions:
Our findings contribute knowledge on research practices that underwent substantial change during COVID-19. The analysis shows that maturing technologies and increased participant and researcher experience alleviated initial challenges. Remote methods facilitated recruitment, eased the burden of research participation, and provided a rich and relevant environment for user-centered evaluation. Unexpected benefits were found, including improved power balance between researchers and vulnerable participants as participants gained more control. The development of support procedures and tools for remote testing will be crucial to fully capitalize on efficiency gains and protect participants' privacy.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.