La depresión en Ecuador 53

In order to fulfil the aim of the survey, three issues were proposed to be asked to the participants, such as:

• Method of sharing information: This sub-category combines three sub-categories from Figure 4.1 which are different methodologies of sending/receiving information, and shared information types. This combination minimises the set of survey questions to be a min- imal set that serves the survey aims.

• Presence in the building: to gain information about participants’ preferences of being alone or in groups.

• Actual social network:This sub-category combines three different sub-categories, namely the frequency of sharing information, with whom they share (relationship strength), and sharing methodologies. This combination builds a clear picture of the participants’ social network members that includes the most popular communication methodology with each member, the frequency of interaction, and the relationship strength.

An electronic survey was conducted on higher education undergraduate first year students of Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics 2011/2012. 119 out of 130 participants completed the survey. Eleven participants were dropped from the study as they did not complete the on-line survey at all. In the final sample of 119 participants (16 female and 103 male), two participants did not fill out the information about their networks and one participant gave an incorrect email. Therefore, the actual number of responses included in this study is 116 participants.

Convincing students to participate was a challenge. Following the University regulations, they were informed that all the collected information would be anonymous before applying any ana- lysis. All the participants’ personal information was anonymous and confidential and only the anonymous version has been used in this study.

A trial implementation was conducted on first year undergraduates in the academic year 2010/2011 in the Cardiff School of Computer Science. All the collected data was confidentially analysed

4.2 Social Networking Survey 61

using different social network analysis metrics. We sought to determine the role of online com- munication in the physical social network, in particular the role that online communication plays in augmenting face-to-face interactions. These observational results are ready to be published in a journal paper. As it was challenge to convince the participants to take part in the experimental study as part of our research, all the observational results are not included in this thesis.

This trial implementation aided us in producing a new version of the survey as we found that some questions could be combined in one question. As a result, a new version of the survey was conducted focusing only on the points that served the aims of the study. Figure 4.3 shows the new issues of the survey that were conducted with the first year undergraduates 2011/2012 of Cardiff School of Computer Science. The full version of the updated survey is included in Appendix A.1.

62 4.2 Social Networking Survey Figur e 4.3: Issues of Course Inf ormation Sharing .

4.3 Summary 63

4.3

Summary

In this chapter, we used the electronic survey as a research methodology to uncover the social network for a group of participants. It was required to understand the participants’ social net- work from their perceptions. This chapter mainly focused on the design and the implementation of the survey in order to collect the ego-centric social information about the participants. Different stages of the design the survey were followed in order to design a good survey that satisfied its aim. The survey aimed to explore how interactions are sustained between individu- als and the extent to which online interactions and electronic media (as well as face-to-face interactions) adapt and support social networks. A concrete picture of students’ social networks was built by examining the physical and online interactions that support relations. The survey was piloted on a group of postgraduate students before it was conducted with the participants. Many issues were considered during the survey design, such as question wording, and the order of the questions being rearranged into a meaningful order.

The survey was applied in two case studies: a trial implementation on first year undergraduates 2009/2010 and an implementation on first year undergraduates 2010/2011 in the School of Computer Science and Informatics. The results of the trial implementation study were analysed and integrated into a journal paper where the results of the second case study have been analysed and integrated in this research. A brief summary about the collected data was outlined. The collected data from the survey revealed different types of social networks (physical interaction network, online communication networks, relationship strength networks) that supported the analysis of their social behaviour from participants’ own perceptions. These social networks will be compared with the opportunistic ones to address the thesis hypothesis.

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Chapter 5

Detecting Opportunistic Networks

Overview

As detailed in Chapter Three, an indoor mobility tracking system was developed to collect mobility and physical interaction data. This allows us to approximate the opportunistic network for our case study of participants. A detailed set-up process for the experimental study was discussed in Chapter Three.

This chapter starts with the experimental schedule in Section 5.1. The mathematical repres- entation of the experimental data set is presented in Section 5.2. In Section 5.3 a statistical description of the collected data is presented. Different algorithms developed to extract the dif- ferent opportunistic networks (in terms of trajectory, duration, and co-location) are outlined in Section 5.4. Section 5.5 describes the characteristics of the extracted opportunistic networks by using some social network analysis metrics. The chapter ends with a summary of the key findings of the analysis.

5.1

Experimental Schedule

The empirical study was carried out on 23rd April 2012 and lasted for three weeks. This period of time was chosen based on the arrival of the Bluetooth mote devices. In addition, it was the end of the second semester when participants’ presence would be regular for exam revision and coursework submission. The experiment timing was divided into six slots where each slot had only two days. The idea of dividing the experiment period into two day time slots was to overcome the limitation of the wireless devices’ battery lifetime. It was found that the lifetime of the battery was, on average, two days and five hours. As a result, it was agreed that the time period would be two days before changing the batteries.

On Monday and Thursday of each week, participants collected the devices at 8:30 am in the morning. On Tuesday and Friday, the participants submitted the devices at 6:00 pm in the even-