software worked, how to upload log files, and how to conduct software upgrades, providing valuable technical training. At the end of the study, we left two versions of the Mind-Full system, including all the hardware.

The staff could then continue to work with the children if they chose. We knew that even if they didn’t, they could utilize the four tablets. For example, the tablets provided a way for counselors to take notes, access email, and collect data remotely when they were working with youth at remote jail sites. Back in Canada, we also raised money for an operation for one of the girls at the school, which had nothing to do with our research and everything to do with ethics.

By examining these ethical questions as we plan and conduct our research, we can, as a community, take the necessary care to ensure that our work has a positive impact and that we are contributing in ways that are important not just in our own minds but also in the lives of the vulnerable populations that our work is intending to serve.

Endnotes

1. Antle, A. N. and Bevans, A. Creative design: Exploring value propositions with urban Nepalese children. In Advances in Computer Entertainment, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7624 . A. Nijholt, T. Romão, and D. Reidsma, eds. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2012, 465–468.

2. Antle, A. N., Chesick, L., Levisohn, A., Sridharan, S. K., and Tan P. Using neurofeedback to teach self-regulation to children living in poverty. Proc. of Conference on Interaction Design for Children. ACM Press, 2015, 119–128.

3. Watters, E. Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American Psyche. Free Press, Ne w York, 2010.

4. Antle, A. N., Chesick, L., Sridharan, S.K., and Levisohn, A. Learning self-regulation: Can a brain computer interface help children living in poverty? Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. (under review).

 

Alissa Antle is a professor in the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University. Her work in child-computer interaction pushes the boundaries of computation to augment the ways in which children develop, think, and learn. In 2015 she was included in the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars.

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they do not allow volunteers from other countries to work directly with the children at the orphanage. They had seen a pattern where a child would form an attachment to a foreigner. This often created an expectation in the child’s mind that the foreigner would adopt the child, return to care for them, or provide funding (i.e., perhaps send them to a foreign boarding school). This expectation often reduced the child’s motivation to try and make a better life for themselves. In addition, children at the orphanage often became emotionally attached to volunteers, and when they left there was attachment damage ( https://childtrauma.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ Bonding_ 13.pdf ).

In our study, to manage expectations and reduce attachment damage, none of the researchers on my team worked directly with the children in the Mind-Full intervention sessions. Instead, we trained and coached the counselors at the school to run the sessions. While this may have reduced the amount of control we had over the intervention protocol, ethically it seemed like the right choice. Together with a Western-trained therapist, I spent the first week of the sessions on site checking that the intervention protocol was being followed, being there to address questions and provide coaching. Our team then left the site, remaining in email contact for several weeks, returning to do another check-in and to be present for the post assessment.

In this way, we avoided having the children form attachments to us.

Fifth, what will we leave behind when the research ends? The challenge is thinking ahead and addressing the legacy that should be left behind when the research is complete. It also includes asking if there are other contributions outside of research that can be made to the community in which we are working.

One of the principles of the non-profit organization that runs the Nepali school is that when people come from developed countries, their role is to do what is called capacity building. This means transferring skills, knowledge, and techniques to the Nepali staff who work at the school, rather than parachuting in, doing work, and then leaving. We also felt that it was important to ask the school what we could leave behind and what they wanted as a legacy.

We came up with a number of legacy items. First, we spent the better part of a week training all the teachers and counselors to assess the children rather than doing it ourselves. We co-created an assessment administration manual with examples of observable behaviors taken directly from the school context. The ability to assess the children using an observation-based survey instrument may improve the staff’s capacity to set goals and monitor the children’s progress in all elements of their schooling. We also spent a good deal of time with two of the counselors explaining how the

What happens when the research is over.

DOI: 10.1145/3137107 COP YRIGHT HELD BY AUTHOR. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00