Qualitative Study

This Is Not Just a Café: Toward Capturing the Dynamics of Urban Places

Social media has provided a huge amount of user-generated data in capturing urban dynamics. Among them, place-level human behavior has been largely detected through people’s check-in records at certain places. Conventionally, places are characterized by a set of pre-defined features, often specified by the owner of the places. In this paper, we argue that capturing socially-meaningful features and dynamics of an urban place may also be done by analyzing human activity traces.

Motherhood and Social Networking Sites: How do sociocultural contexts and technological factors affect Korean mothers’ KakaoStory use?

In this paper, we investigate the role of sociocultural contexts and technological characteristics in user behaviors on social networking sites (SNSs). This study focuses on Korean mothers’ social roles and their use of KakaoStory—one of the most popular SNSs in Korea. Through interviews with fifteen Korean mother users, this research studies changing social roles of Korean mothers with childbirth, and its influence on KakaoStory use. Also, we investigate how KakaoStory’s unique characteristics affect mothers’ usage.

Information Behavior of International Students Settling in an Unfamiliar Geo-spatial Environment

This paper presents the findings from a project about how international students seek and acquire information during their settlement in an unknown geo-spatial environment. Through semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and cognitive mapping with twenty international students, this study examines their information needs, information sources, and settlement experiences in the host country.

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