A sociotechnical approach to smartphone research: outline for a holistic, qualitative mobile method
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Smartphones have become crucial for understanding how digital technologies are adopted and adapted into people's lives, while also emerging as tools for studying social phenomena more broadly. Drawing on insights from our own longitudinal work in Solomon Islands, this article details a sociotechnical approach to smartphone research that combines both potentialities. It distinguishes itself from other smartphone-based methods by connecting media-centric perspectives with non-media-centric approaches through an additional focus on body techniques. The approach is centered on object-centric, semi-structured interviews embedded in longitudinal participant observation and theoretically informed by anthropologies of technologies. Emphasizing a holistic perspective and the diversity of human experiences, this approach allows for generating material evidence of contextually-embedded mediations of social relationships through the hardware and software of the phones themselves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".