How to refer to people
Posted: May 23rd, 2008 | 5 Comments »As discussed by David R. Millen in Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research
“Even the terminology used to describe the research sample belies different research perspectives. For example, psychologists refer to subjects, HCI researchers talk about users, market researchers refer to consumers or segments, and anthropologists refer to informants. “
It’s a good point, but a simplification, I think, and perhaps a bit out of date now. Psychology has moved towards “participant” in some recent books and HCI appears to be following.
[...] do these practices deal with creating material that engages people? (Related to Nicolas’ recent post on a similar topic — how do different practices talk about people? How are they referred to, and how does that shape [...]
This is some good stuff. It’s perhaps most interesting to think about how these things shape what the research implications become. It’s curious that there appear to be few perspectives that refer to people, rather than the more subjective and instrumental terms seen here.
@Kevin: mmhmm although the term “participants” is more and more used, the large majority of researchers in psychology (especially cognitive psychology) use “subjects” (at least in the european circles I know)
Yeah, my sample is admittedly limited. I’m in the US, though the latest psychology textbook I’ve looked at (and which used “participant”) was from the UK. Re: “user”, there’s a good book by Ellen Rose called User Error (BTL books) that looks at that troublesome term (among other things).