Sorry to be so late in reacting. The issue caught my interest after three weeks on a Swedish Island - Gotland. Sunny! So I may need some intellectual change! Here is my reaction to the discussion.
Thanks for putting the homenet study as a warning example! I have used it myself in a course in methodology. Useful to have flawed studies! Did you see, for example, that the web-formt of the paper does not allow you to see the figures? I had to get the original paper!
I also saw that somebody asked for the "flaws" in the study. I have seen a couple: 1) the sample of respondents is not random. This is common in psychological research, but here, the sample is probably rather biased. People did get a computer to try. How many have not already got one? Who are the people who got the computer? 2) the data are mostly based on ratings. Ratings have a tendency to get biased if they are repeated. There is something that is called "regression toward the mean". This means for instance that if you are very positive at the beginning, the average will be lower at a repeated measure, just because the average was above the (supposed) mean from the beginning. Thus, one possible bias can be the following: people were happy to get a computer. Later, they, probably got disappointed with the utility of the computer. This affects all ratings. 3) the actual "significant" differences are VERY small! You have to read the original paper. I usually do not recommend my students to talk about effects in this range at all! Good methodology and ethics go together in research, as many have proposed. We are responsible to our subjects as well as to other researchers to do as good a research as possible. Why do we else have research at all? Yvonne
1. Carnegie Mellon's HomeNet study
the study: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/copetas/www/public/pr/aug31-98.h...
reaction: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/featherstone.html
-- Yvonne Waern Professor emerita CMC-research group Computer and System Sciences Stockholm University /KTH Forum 100, S-164 40 Kista, Sweden Phone (home): +46 8 500 307 18