New publication: Shared motivations, goals and values in the practice of personal science

2022-05-28

Our study on Shared motivations, goals and values in the practice of personal science: a community perspective on self-tracking for empirical knowledge was just published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. This study dates back to a series of 22 interviews with personal science practitioners from the Open Humans, Quantified Self and similar communities early last year, and is the result of an intense period of classifying and interpreting qualitative data, as well as sharing preliminary results with all the participants.

This study contributes a conceptual framework based on previous work in the fields of personal science, citizen science, and peer production, among others. Furthermore, it provides a community view of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, personal goals, and shared values in the emerging practice of technology-mediated self-experimentation.