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Social interaction and reflection for behaviour change

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Abstract

This article introduces the theme issue on social interaction and reflection for behaviour change. A large body of research exists on systems designed to help users in changing their behaviours, for instance, to exercise more regularly or to reduce energy consumption. Increasingly, these systems focus on multiple users, often to encourage open-ended reflection rather than prescribing a particular course of action. As background for this theme issue, this article presents a literature review on behaviour change support systems that focus on social interaction and reflection. The review highlights five key approaches amongst these systems: social traces, social support, collective use, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action. Each approach offers unique benefits, but also challenges for the design of behaviour change support systems. We highlight how the articles in this theme issue contribute to our current understanding of these five approaches, and beyond that, set out some broad directions for future work.

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Acknowledgments

This theme issue is the outcome of the First International Workshop on Behaviour Change Support Systems (BCSS) held at the Eighth International Conference on Persuasive Technology held in Sydney, Australia in April 2013. The editors would like to thank their co-convener Sitwat Langrial and the participants of this workshop for their assistance with this theme issue. We would like to thank our supportive expert reviewers: Nilufar Baghaei, Annemarie Braakman, Shanton Chang, Rik Crutzen, Brian Cugelman, Sebastian Deterding, Marc Fabri, Eva Ganglbauer, Florian Güldenpfennig, Giulio Jacucci, Pasi Karppinen, Saskia Kelders, Rilla Khaled, Olga Kulyk, Tuck Leong, Geke Ludden, Marianna Obrist, Hans Ossebaard, Wally Smith, Terje Solvoll, Wolfgang Spreicer, Agnis Stibe, Kristian Torning, Roos van der Vaart, Greg Wadley, and Jobke Wentzel. This research was supported by the Cancer Council Victoria and the Australian Research Council (ARC), grant LP110100046. This research was part of the OASIS research group of Martti Ahtisaari Institute, University of Oulu. This study was supported by the SalWe Research Program for Mind and Body (Tekes—The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation grant 1104/10).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Bernd Ploderer

  2. Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Wolfgang Reitberger

  3. Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Harri Oinas-Kukkonen

  4. Department of Psychology, Health and Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Julia van Gemert-Pijnen

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  1. Bernd Ploderer
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  2. Wolfgang Reitberger
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Correspondence to Bernd Ploderer.

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Ploderer, B., Reitberger, W., Oinas-Kukkonen, H. et al. Social interaction and reflection for behaviour change. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 1667–1676 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0779-y

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