Coding Manual for “The Watcher and The Watched: Social Judgments about Privacy in a Public Place”

Abstract

How do people reason about privacy when sophisticated cameras capture people’s images in a public space? Toward answering this question, we interviewed 120 participants in one of four conditions. All conditions involved a HDTV camera on top of a university building that overlooked a public plaza. In one condition, 30 participants were in the office of the university building with a view through a window onto the public plaza. In a second condition, 30 participants were in the same office except that now the window was covered with a large display, and real-time HDTV image of the public plaza was displayed on the large-display “window.” In a third condition, 30 participants were in the original office after it had been closed off with drapes (in effect, an inside office). In a fourth condition, 30 participants were in the public plaza. This technical report provides the coding manual used to code the reasoning of the participants in all conditions, emphasizing the perspectives of “The Watcher” and “The Watched.” By a coding manual we mean a philosophically and empirically grounded means for coding social-cognitive data. The coding manual was developed from half of the interview data, and then applied to the entire interview data set. Our goal is to present this manual such that – as part of an on-going iterative scientific process – it can be used and modified by others interested in investigating people’s conceptions of privacy in public, especially in the context of technologically-mediated interactions.