Food at 12:30 pm. Discussion begins at 12:45 pm. Everyone invited.

Drawing on survey research that Professor Boase co-developed in Japan, Canada, and America, he will begin the talk by discussing the implications of mobile and fixed internet platforms for the maintenance of friend, neighbor, workmate, and kin networks. Although this research clearly shows that the internet is strongly embedded in these types of networks, the self-report nature of the survey data limits our ability to understand the potentially complex communication strategies that individuals employ when using the internet to juggle their many social ties. Dr. Boase will dedicate the remainder of the talk to discussing how the type of rich communication data necessary to understand these strategies can be collected using an Android phone application that he co-developed with Dr. Tetsuro Kobayashi of Japan’s National Institute for Informatics. He’ll further discuss how this behavioral data can be combined with self-report survey measures to better understand how individuals use the internet to leverage information, support, and resources from their personal networks.

Bio:

Dr. Jeffrey Boase is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and while completing his studies he spent a year at the Harvard Kennedy School on a predoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Digital Government. After receiving his PhD he spent two years working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Tokyo.