“I finally felt I had the tools to control these urges”: Empowering Students to Achieve Their Device Use Goals With the Reduce Digital Distraction Workshop
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
How they used Delve
Researchers at the University of Oxford used Delve to code the 25 interviews in a CHI study of a digital distraction workshop, with the first author and a co-author independently coding and then reconciling, while NVivo handled the separate workshop and survey material.
“Thematic coding was conducted using NVivo v1.7.1 (workshop and survey data) and Delve (interview data; https://delvetool.com).”
- Field
- Digital wellbeing / self-regulation of device use
- Data
- 280 students across 62 workshops over six academic terms, contributing workshop reflection notes and free-text survey responses, plus 25 participant interviews conducted one to two weeks after follow-up surveys; participants were 40% PhD, 35% undergraduate and 25% master's students
- Approach
- Inductive reflexive thematic analysis following Braun et al., triangulated with quantitative survey data from an open trial without a control group. The qualitative dataset was split into three parts keeping each participant's data together; for each part the first author and a different co-author independently read and coded, then iteratively discussed codes, recoded excerpts and discussed themes, with the first author carrying forward the codes from the previous part. The interview data was analysed the same way by the first author and a further co-author, whose coding was informed solely by the interviews
- Data types
- Interviews, Open-ended survey responses, Documents
Abstract
Digital self-control tools (DSCTs) help people control their time and attention on digital devices, using interventions like distraction blocking or usage tracking. Most studies of DSCTs’ effectiveness have focused on whether a single intervention reduces time spent on a single device. In reality, people may require combinations of DSCTs to achieve more subjective goals across multiple devices. We studied how DSCTs can address individual needs of university students (n = 280), using a workshop where students reflect on their goals before exploring relevant tools. At 1-3 month follow-ups, 95% of respondents still used at least one type of DSCT, typically applied across multiple devices, and there was substantial variation in the tool combinations chosen. We observed a large increase in self-reported digital self-control, suggesting that providing a space to articulate goals and self-select appropriate DSCTs is a powerful way to support people who struggle to self-regulate digital device use.
Citation
Ulrik Lyngs, Kai Lukoff, Petr Slovák, Michael Inzlicht, Maureen Freed, Hannah Andrews, Claudine Tinsman, Laura Csuka, Lize Alberts, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Guido Makransky, Kasper Hornbæk, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt (2024). “I finally felt I had the tools to control these urges”: Empowering Students to Achieve Their Device Use Goals With the Reduce Digital Distraction Workshop. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642946