I knew that people wore headphones as a ‘do not disturb’ sign, but thought it would be necessary to produce empirical evidence to support this intuition. I had done so during my Master of Science candidacy, and found that on average people scored about 5 points less on my desire to interact scale. I hope the findings can help better design interaction in the future.
Do people wish to interact less with others who are wearing headphones? If so, what are some of the factors predicting such behavior? I posed these questions after having learned that people withdraw from social situations in a number of ways, as a response to stressful social situations. Headphone wearing also became a culturally significant behavior, when portable listening devices such as the Walkman enjoyed their meteoric rise in the 80s. I then reviewed existing literature on conditions that drive people to withdraw from social interaction. This helped me better understand why people would want to reduce their social interaction, which is known to promote collaboration and innovation.
In order to answer my questions, I first conducted a pilot study where I observed how students behave towards others wearing headphones in a large common space on campus. I also informally interviewed them to get a better sense. This pilot study helped clarify the questions I included in the validated scale instrument I created for this thesis study.
Additionally, I also found a number of behavioral cues students performed to signal to others their unavailability, such as turning their faces away from sociality, and choosing to sit in a corner. Many interviewees echoed this observation and said that they either sit facing the wall, or pretend to focus on a task even when they are free, to ward off unwanted social interaction when in the commons.
I constructed my survey instrument on Qualtrics, and developed my interview protocol. My scale was an image-based Likert scale instrument that tasked participants to rate images of people wearing headphones in different settings, based on how likely participants would want to interact with the people depicted. This method was chosen after considering the restraints on simulating the interaction context I am studying.
The scale was then distributed via MTurk, to population based in the U.S. I collected 200 data points, which was filtered to a final total of 83 points. I transformed the Likert-scale responses into quantitative data, and conducted regression analysis to establish correlations between the variables I investigated.
I also interviewed 30 student participants in the Commons my study is set in. The results from the structured interviews were formally recorded. I have also recorded the interviews for transcriptions. The data I collected were analyzed through thematic analysis.
People showed less desire to interact with others wearing headphones. In other words, headphone usage can be an effective privacy regulation mechanism. My data and finding empirically supported my intuition. Further, my finding suggested that the level of crowding isn’t correlated with headphone usage.
