Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.

/pdf/common-method-biases-in-behavioral-research-a-critical-53ocysaemj.pdf

Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies.

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one’s ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N = 286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.

/pdf/the-benefits-of-facebook-friends-social-capital-and-college-2j90l44gqu.pdf

The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites

This paper differs from previous examinations of organizational learning in that it is broader in scope and more evaluative of the literatures. Four constructs related to organizational learning knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory are articulated, and the literatures related to each are described and critiqued.

The literature on knowledge acquisition is voluminous and multi-faceted, and so the knowledge acquisition construct is portrayed here as consisting of five subconstructs or subprocesses: 1 drawing on knowledge available at the organization's birth, 2 learning from experience, 3 learning by observing other organizations, 4 grafting on to itself components that possess knowledge needed but not possessed by the organization, and 5 noticing or searching for information about the organization's environment and performance. Examination of the related literatures indicates that much has been learned about learning from experience, but also that there is a lack of cumulative work and a lack of integration of work from different research groups. Similarly, much has been learned about organizational search, but there is a lack of conceptual work, and there is a lack of both cumulative work and syntheses with which to create a more mature literature. Congenital learning, vicarious learning, and grafting are information acquisition subprocesses about which relatively little has been learned.

The literature concerning information distribution is rich and mature, but an aspect of information distribution that is central to an organization's benefitting from its learning, namely how units that possess information and units that need this information can find each other quickly and with a high likelihood, is unexplored. Information interpretation, as an organizational process, rather than an individual process, requires empirical work for further advancement. Organizational memory is much in need of systematic investigation, particularly by those whose special concerns are improving organizational learning and decision making.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634941.pdf

Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures

Expertise is the primary resource and product of professional service and technical firms. These firms often organize around project teams that advise and work under contract for clients. A key problem for management is to deploy expertise in project teams so as to meet the expertise requirements of projects and clients. Because expertise may be geographically distributed across multiple sites, many of these firms create virtual or distributed teams. Doing so gives these firms access to a larger pool of knowledge resources than would be available at one site and helps leverage expertise across the organization. However, geographically distributed collaboration in teams incurs coordination and other costs that local work does not. Is a distributed team worth these costs? We studied a professional service firm with distributed and collocated project teams. In this firm, domain expertise tended to be concentrated within geographic sites, whereas methodological expertise was distributed across the firm. We examined whether a better match of domain and methodological expertise to the needs of projects resulted in more profitable projects, and whether distributed teams matched these two types of expertise to the requirements of projects as well as or better than did collocated teams. We found that most projects were collocated, with members drawn from one site who had domain expertise that matched project requirements as well as when members were drawn from other sites. The profits of projects were unrelated to the match of domain expertise with project requirements. However, project profits were significantly and positively related to a match of methodological expertise with project requirements. Furthermore, distributed projects showed a stronger match of methodological expertise with project requirements than did collocated projects, and predicted disproportionately more profits. We conclude that an appropriate utilization of organizationally distributed expertise has a positive impact on project performance.

Managing expertise in a distributed environment

This chapter contains sections titled: The Theory of Transactive Memory, Application to Intranets and Distributed Work Groups, Implications for Research and Practice, Notes, References

Fostering Intranet Knowledge Sharing: An Integration of Transactive Memory and Public Goods Approaches

Recent expert evaluations of the condition and funding of educational research in the USA assume that basic research in the social sciences is a crucial factor in increasing our understanding and ultimately improving the practice of education (see, for example, the 1977 report1 of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Fundamental Research Relevant to Education). Past tests of this assumption, however, have generally relied upon argument by example or anecdote. In the present study, we analyze citation patterns in the education literature to test the corollary proposition that basic research in the social sciences has had a substantial impact on the literature in education. Empirical data collected on citation patterns in the education literature are found to be largely consistent with this proposition.

The impact of basic research in the social sciences: the case of education

In this article, we examine online community design in light of the common identity and common bond theory in social psychology. We review literature on the antecedents and consequences of two type...

Identity and bond theories to understand design decisions for online communities.

The tendency to believe and act on others' misinformation is documented in much prior work. This paper focuses on inaccuracy blindness, the tendency to take a collaborator's poor information at face value, which reduces problem-solving success. We draw on social psychological research from the 1970s showing that evaluative rating scales can prompt a change in perspective. In a series of studies, we prototyped and tested an evaluation prompt meant to encourage skepticism in participant detectives trying to identify a serial killer. In tests of the prototype, the prompt was partially successful in inducing skepticism (Exp. 1), but a larger study (Exp. 2) showed that, despite the evaluation prompt, participants' inaccuracy blindness persisted. This work, and the literature more generally, shows that the tendency to be misled by collaborators' inaccurate information remains a strong phenomenon that is hard to counteract and remains a significant challenge for the CHI community.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3173574.3174068

Sara Kiesler

Papers

Managing expertise in a distributed environment

Fostering Intranet Knowledge Sharing: An Integration of Transactive Memory and Public Goods Approaches

The impact of basic research in the social sciences: the case of education

Identity and bond theories to understand design decisions for online communities.

Inaccuracy Blindness in Collaboration Persists, even with an Evaluation Prompt