Group: Role: Tools / Techniques:

2 people Qualitative researcher Grounded Theory

Project Overview We want to find out the problems and issues people face with technology during meetings. Specifically, we are interested in answering the following questions: Is technology helping the meeting? How do people adjust their behavior to fit technology, and what problems, if any, does it cause? We define technology to include both electronic devices and more traditional things such as paper, pen, even furniture itself. Through this study we hope to learn about qualitative evaluation and analysis as well as technology use. Method We went to three meetings taking place at Georgia Tech campus and watched meeting participants as they interact with technology. We recorded their interactions with technologies, using pen and paper, during the course of the meeting. We used non-participant observation, which is a method where we watched participants but did not actively engage with them during the meeting. This allowed us to watch the typical uses and engagement with technology which is our interest. We draw floor plans of the meeting rooms, recorded around 150 minutes of meetings. We paid attention to room settings, postures & movements, speech acts, attention, laptop activity, and our own interpretations and bias. We did Open Coding, Axial Coding, and Seletive Coding on our notes. Result We learned and practiced how to do qualitative research using Ground Theory. People show many signs of boredom duing meetings. They used fewer varieties of technology than we expected. People had troubles plugging things in.