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The United States Census has plans to move a large portion of its data collection to online and computerized forms. As a part of that, they are evaluating a web form for census data.

In order to avoid collecting personal data (like that typically collected in the census), we are planning a survey evaluation using data on people's pets -- specifically, dogs. The idea is to evaluate interfaces for asking people about their pets, then generalize that to interfaces for collecting personal data. The reason dogs were chosen was that people tend to know a fair bit about their dogs, including easily-recalled information (breed, age) and externally-stored information (registration number, rabies vaccine tag number). This information corresponds to the information people have about their family members, but does not entail the privacy concerns of personal data.

Participants:

Susan Campbell, Ph.D. Student, Department of Psychology

Kent Norman, Faculty, Department of Psychology