RS Diary

This app is for quickly and easily recording and sharing your own resilience strategies, or strategies by others that you encounter or observe. This activity is being conducted as part of an ongoing research project looking into human factors and the psychology of adaptability and error prevention.

> What is a resilience strategy?

We frequently utilise a variety of little strategies to reduce risks or errors in every day life:- things like setting an alarm on a mobile phone to act as a reminder, leaving an umbrella by the front door to make sure its not forgotten on the way out, or double-checking the traffic situation to find the best route for a journey before heading off. Equally, people apply these ideas to technology:- flagging important emails, emailing themselves weblinks or files which will be required later, or even supplementing device controls with improvised notes (e.g. “press the green button here to make a copy ->” ) etc.

Researchers have recently begun to take an active interest in how people devise and use these strategies, which we term cognitive resilience strategies. The central idea around these resilience strategies and behaviours is that people pro-actively take action to reduce the likely impact (either in terms of occurrence or severity) of a perceived threat, risk or challenge. Alternatively, people may also deploy these strategies to otherwise creatively improve efficiency or performance.

This may take the form of intentional, creative improvisation (i.e. coming up with a strategy for the first time), or routine and absent-minded reuse of strategies.

> Features & Functionality

The RS Diary app offers the ability to write plain text descriptions of strategies, and also provides space for additional information in the form of several brief (optional) questions to help you compose entries.

The RS Diary app also enables you to capture or upload photos to help illustrate strategy entries, and also collects automated location data and optional demographic information to facilitate our analyses.

> About this research and your data

This app has been designed and this data is being gathered as part of a PhD project at City University London looking into how individuals maintain performance and mitigate error. By downloading and composing entries with this app, you will be contributing to our knowledge and understanding in this area.

As a result of the data being used to support academic research, excerpts of your strategy descriptions may subsequently be published in academic venues (e.g. publications in academic journals, conference papers and or a PhD thesis). However any reported information will be fully anonymised and no personally identifiable information will be included with any publication. All information you provide will otherwise be kept confidential, and will only be accessible to the small set of app developers and researchers currently attached to the RS Diary project.

By submitting an entry, you consent to your data being included as a part of this research project.