Perceptions of personal privacy in smart home technologies: Do user assessments vary depending on the research method?

Abstract

Nowadays all Western societies are confronted with the challenges resulting from demographic change, which are (partially) manageable by technical innovations, ranging from sophisticated single devices up to Ambient Assisted Living. However, exceeding the threshold to people’s homes evokes diverse privacy concerns. In this paper, aspects of personal privacy are exposed and validated by three different research methods: focus groups, questionnaire, and an experimental study. The results of the perceived relevance of privacy across the three methodologies showed a decrease of the attributed importance from the focus group to the hands-on experimental study and an increase of the variability of the data. In order to gain genuine exhaustive information about the user’s perceptions of (aspects of) new technologies it is therefore insufficient to rely on one single research method. Instead, a multi-method research approach is postulated.