Janne Lindqvist has received a new NSF award from the Sociology program with collaborators from Rutgers Sociology. The title of the project is "Developing an Application for Assessing Respondent Experiences of Their Surroundings in Real Time” and the award is for $51,847.
The abstract of the award is given below.
"Developing an Application for Assessing Respondent Experiences of Their Surroundings in Real Time”
The main objective of the project is to develop a robust method for measuring and understanding inequality in neighborhood experiences. The key thrust here is that we will implement and evaluate an app for smartphones to collect live information on people’s movement and neighborhood experiences as they happen. We will assess the feasibility of obtaining immediate explicit and implicit (nonconscious) measures of experiences in a place using the smartphone app. We will use these data to develop measures of mobile segregation and indicators of how people, in the moment, perceive their surroundings and opportunities in the places they go.
Obtaining data on how people explicitly and implicitly experience the places they visit, and how those experiences encourage or discourage them from going to certain locales, can help inform policy interventions that incentivize contact across demographic groups. The open source smartphone app developed in the course of this research will be shared with other researchers to advance knowledge on the connections between social, spatial, and cognitive processes and should have broad application beyond the specific study of social segregation in daily life.