Research Question: What is the Effect of knowledge (technical) on user’s attitude on privacy
for location-based services? (subject to modify)
Thesis has three parts–
1) Survey: I would like to conduct a survey in which user’s will be asked series of questions
to identify effect of user’s knowledge on user’s attitude on privacy for location-based
services.
Survey is of 3 parts:
Part 1: Measure knowledge: The kind of technical knowledge pertaining to user
awareness of how LBS works, in terms of capturing user information and providing
personalized services. It’s not necessary to focus on engineering side of things–only how
such systems may capture user information (perhaps through GPS embedded in one’s
phone, for example) and then use that information to provide services (like navigation, or
personalized ads for vendors in the vicinity).
Part 2: Measure Attitude: Create/fine a series of scale items asking respondents to
state their level of awareness (o–not at all; 7–fully aware) of specific aspects about LBS
functions (e.g., certain location-based apps on your phone track your movements).
Attitude may include Tolerance, appreciation, perceived necessity, potential for negative
uses and effects.
Part 3: Demographics
Name, Age, Sex etc
2) Data Analysis: Analyzing data received from online survey: Data Analysis must be done
with Python and I think we can use use Pearson Correlation Coefficient method or can do
regression analysis to identify the relation in knowledge and user’s attutude. Do you think of
any other method to find the correlation?
3) Report: Report should answer all the what, why’s and how related questions to our
survey, data analysis method, limitations, future work, references etc.
45- 50 Pages are fine for the report.
Points to note: These points must be answered and approved by my professor before I
publish my survey.
1. Majority of report can only be written after we get results from our Survey as we
need data to analyze. Before Survey, other relevant parts can be written.
2. Scientific motivation for my topic (why my RQ (Research Question) is relevant,
results from other researchers, what I want to build on and what problem I want to
solve, which other researchers did not sufficiently solved yet)
3. First draft of survey design (what kind of questions are relevant, just using questions
from other surveys is not enough, they should be connected to my specific RQ and
should have the potential to give new insights about the problem I want to solve)
4. First outline of the analysis I want to make afterwards, what kind of methods I want
to use depending on the scales of the questions drafted in point (2) mentioned
above.
5. Questions for Part 1 and Part 2 has to be carefully designed so that it can serves our
purpose for data analysis which is second part of our thesis. Questions for survey can
be used from other research papers but we need to mention why we used those
questions and how they are relevant with our Research Question.
6. This thesis requires research from your part and come up with the solution to
address my RQ.
7. Also, there is research regarding the influence of knowledge on privacy behaviour, so
you definitely need to mention this and clearly work out what you really trying to
contribute with my thesis.
8. You can also mention the “Privacy Paradox” which describes the dilemma of having
an intention but not acting according to it. That also involves privacy knowledge.
9. Motivation for my thesis topic, what I am trying to achieve and what I am trying to
contribute with my thesis.
Data Collection
For data collection we will conduct an online survey which I have mentioned in document. It
is the first crucial part of the thesis. You need to find suitable questions to ask in survey
which serves our purpose. In report we need to mention why we chose those questions.
Report format:
-Abstract
-Table of contents
-Content chapters (body of the thesis Intro, Related Work, Literature Review, Methodology,
Experiment Setup, Results and Evaluation, Conclusion, Future Work and all appropriate
chapters)
-References (Chicago Style)
-Bibliography list
-Appendix
Report Chapters details
– Introduction (no figures) Introduction + motivation + state of the art Objective +
structure of work
– Literature Review
– System/approach/methodology
Description of method
Basic/advanced discussion of the background of this work
Avoid to explain basic concepts, e.g. how a transistor works
– Experiment/setup
Provide detailed information concerning the boundary conditions of your
work: whatis given, what are the specifications, what is your contribution?
– Results/Evaluation
Rules for Report writing
– Consistency of diagrams and figures
– Please generate each diagram by means of a proper plotting program; screenshots
are not allowed. Ensure that axis labels, numbers and legend are readable.
– Results without a (critical) evaluation are worthless.
– If applicable, comparison two similar approaches
– Summary and outlook
Summarize in 2-3 paragraphs what you did and what you achieved. Include
future improvements to your work.
Important to note:
– This thesis is NOT like that I set the requirements first and writer starts working on it.
Above specifications are kind of roadmap of this thesis. Requirements may or may
not change as the thesis progress. Requirements also depends on my professor’s
feedback. Writer should not say that this was not listed in the requirements, so he’ll
not do it. I’ll try to keep my requirements same as possible.
– Roadmap will remain the same.
– Step 1: Prepare Survey questions
– Step 2: Conduct Test Survey to see if questions and analysis is serving our purpose.
– Step 3: Conduct a survey (around 150 responses)
– Step 4: Analyze data collected from survey using Python and Statistics.
– Step 5: Writing report (Can be started from Step 1)