Self-tracking - the practice of capturing data about one’s own activities, often through wearable technology - is an ever-growing phenomenon, and one that is firmly established in the worlds of physical activity and public health. Recording statistics about our own activities is becoming commonplace, with our devices prompting us to measure things like step counts, heart rate, calories burned - even the quality of our sleep. Increasingly, this data is becoming linked to our perception of our own health and wellbeing, with healthcare providers even sometimes suggesting this kind of tracking as part of a programme of care.
Dr Lee Pretlove - Information School PhD graduate and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow recently began his 12-month ESRC-funded Fellowship (through the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership) looking at self-tracking specifically in relation to running communities, building on his PhD project and examining what this kind of relationship to our data could mean for physical and mental health more broadly.
Awarded in 2022, Dr Pretlove’s PhD research was also on self-tracking in running, and forms the basis for his current research. Initially looking at activity apps like Strava - which track the distance, route, time, steps and calories burned on a given walk or run - Dr Pretlove wanted to see how runners interacted with their so-called ‘personal digital archives’ - but he quickly realised that the project needed to broaden in scope to fully understand the issue.
“There is a whole practice around information and running that’s not just the data”, he explains. “Self-tracking is actually quite a small part of it.”
To get a firsthand insight into runners’ experiences, Dr Pretlove went on runs with them whilst wearing a 360 camera, talking to them throughout the run (“We didn’t run very fast!”, he adds), with the camera capturing any time the runners glanced at their smart watches. Reviewing the footage, he found that experienced runners didn’t look very often, which got Dr Pretlove thinking about runners with less experience.
“What about people who can’t buy the tech, or don’t know how to use it?”, he wondered. “If a doctor prescribes someone to go and do more exercise, they might recommend the NHS ‘Couch to 5k’ app, but there’s no follow-up on whether people know how to effectively do that. Can they afford a smartphone that can run the app? Do they know how to use it?”
These questions form one element of the basis for the ESRC fellowship project, which in part looks at the barriers to inclusion for self-tracking in running, as well as the behaviours associated with it. Does the idea of tying running to technology put people off and stop them seeing the broader health benefits?
“In our increasingly digital society, every activity has a piece of tech or a digital add-on available, and I’m really interested in the tension between getting people active and the tech tie-ins”, says Dr Pretlove. “Running - or any kind of physical activity - doesn’t have to have a device attached to it!”
Dr Pretlove’s project - one of 7 fellowships awarded annually through the White Rose Consortium - is entitled “Access and use of running self-tracking data for public health”, and is mentored by Information School Professor of Data and Society Prof Jo Bates.
The project has four strands, the first of which makes up about 50% of the project and involves producing and submitting four journal articles and two conference papers, largely relating to Dr Pretlove’s existing PhD work. A paper will be submitted to Big Data and Society about how people and technologies interact in self-tracking environments, and the black box control that tech manufacturers and platforms have over the data.
“It’s looking at how the person sits between all of these information infrastructures and data”, explains Dr Pretlove.
A second paper will be submitted to Health and Place about Dr Pretlove’s 360 camera method of participant interaction, and then a third paper is planned to be submitted to Archival Science looking at personal digital archives more generally.
“You’ve got all this data about yourself, but where does it sit?”, asks Dr Pretlove. “How do you curate it? How do you look after it?”
The second strand of the fellowship involves new research alongside the development of a network of academics and engaging with non-academic partners for knowledge exchange. This will begin with networking with existing partnerships like the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub , to help Dr Pretlove frame his questions and gather suggestions for other contacts. Then, further engagement will involve public health-related organisations (such as GPs, parkrun UK, Sport England) and digital inclusion charities (like Rural Action Derbyshire, Citizens Online); an array of non-academic organisations interested in wellbeing, physical health and digital inclusion.
The workshop is intended as a dialogue between the partners and Dr Pretlove, finding out how future research would be valuable to them and their users.
“It’s not me telling them what research I want to do, it’s more saying ‘I’ve got some ideas, but what actually works for you on the ground?’”, he explains of his desire to make his research as applicable as possible to these organisations and to society.
As well as understanding the barriers to inclusion with self-tracking in running, Dr Pretlove also hopes to understand the mental health aspect to adopting technology in running. During his PhD research, Dr Pretlove found that some experienced runners with good physical health were suffering negative mental health effects during the act of running as a direct result of their self-tracking; there was a disconnect between their bodies - which felt fine - and their devices, which were sometimes telling them they were doing something wrong.
Then there’s the social element to apps like Strava; just like all social media platforms, these can lead to comparing oneself to others and feeling inadequate as a result, even when, for example, you might be injured and therefore running less well. Add in the actively competitive angle to running (through races and the recording of times) and you have a cocktail for negative thought patterns.
“When people are comparing themselves to other runners on these apps, it means the competition doesn’t stop just with actual races”, says Dr Pretlove.
“I do have a solution”, he continues: “don’t wear a smart device when you run!” You’ll still get a time at an official race, he argues, or you can just use a traditional, timekeeping watch and look at it at the start and end of a run.
“However, when you really get into running, there’s social capital in having these devices, and you do get questioned if you don’t have one”, he says. Some participants in his PhD research even told Dr Pretlove that they didn’t think you can participate in society without engaging in the kinds of big data structures provided by these types of apps and technologies.
Therefore, whether or not this is actually true, having to accept that they will wear these devices when running, Dr Pretlove wants to see how runners can adopt better practices to protect their mental health.
The fourth paper to be authored as part of the fellowship will come from research in these areas following the workshops, and will tie into the next strand of the project, which is public engagement. This will include a short video on the topic to be included in the 2024 ESRC Festival of Social Sciences in Sheffield, as well as talks, non-academic publications, and a podcast.
Dr Pretlove recently gave a talk entitled “My Pacing is Pants” - the title being a quote from one of the participants in his PhD research - at a running club in the town of Ely, discussing the effects of running data on runners’ health and behaviours, with another edition of the talk in the Sheffield area in the planning stages. Dr Pretlove will also be going to the National Running Show in Birmingham this month to gather quotes from runners for his podcast, ‘Decoding Digital Fitness’, for which he is interviewing both academics and the public and creating conversation between them. Though the first 4 or 5 episodes of the podcast will be around his research running data, as the title suggests, the longer-term plan is for the podcast to go beyond this and start to discuss wider information behaviours in physical activity.
All of these engagement activities are intended to make people more aware of the issues that are raised by Dr Pretlove’s research, and consider their own practices.
“It’s not a big change I’m looking for”, he says. “I just think people should question what they’re doing a bit more. Even if I can make one person think ‘I might do something differently’, that would be great. Maybe people might start to think ‘I might run today and not take my smart watch with me”
The final strand of the fellowship is personal development; learning how to be a better researcher. Dr Pretlove’s journey has already taken him from a non-academic career in Information Management into academia, and he picked running as his PhD topic due to a personal interest.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the way people manage their information”, he explains. “Running was a starting point, but as part of my wider career I want to start looking at all forms of physical activity, and have my research become more inclusive beyond this small area.”
Dr Pretlove’s research style uses a small number of participants, but he goes very deep, with rich, qualitative research from in-depth conversations and interviews. As a result, he couldn’t generalise from his PhD research, but it was still very clear that some runners needed help, and he wondered whether it was a widespread problem.
“What really struck me was the sense of history and connection that particularly experienced male runners had with their personal running data”, Dr Pretlove says. “It was a part of their identity, and the idea of taking it away provoked a visceral, negative reaction.”
Female runners appeared not to care as much, so the potential gender split was yet another area that it seemed worth exploring. Why does this difference exist, and how does it tie into wider concerns about men’s mental health?
Whatever the answers, it seems abundantly clear that running is simply an exemplary microcosm of issues around self-tracking and physical and mental health that have much wider implications. Dr Pretlove hopes that using both his PhD and his current ESRC fellowship research as springboards, he can continue to widen his scope and seek to better peoples’ understanding of their own information behaviours and the effects they might be having.
