The evaluation of user`s representation of personal computer

Relevance. The increasing complexity of technical devices used by humans and the high rate of emergence of new devices and their functions lead to the emergence of various practices and habits of working with them. It is possible to see a specific representation of what a personal computer (PC) consists of and how it works for each of these practices. This representation has developed in the process of working with a PC as its mental model. However, the task of reconstructing these models and comparing different respondents with each other according to the specifics of their understanding of the PC does not have the necessary methodological support. It is necessary to get representations of PC in a comparable form to effectively compare the different people`s/group`s representations of PC with each other and study their mental models, preserving the qualitative specifics of these “images of PC”.

The purpose of this work is to empirically approbate the technology of reconstructing the representations of PC users about the computer itself as a multidimensional psychological space of descriptions of its work.

Methods. Methods of group interviews and card sorting were used to collect descriptions of “how PC works”, multidimensional scaling methods were used to reconstruct representations of PC among groups of study participants.

Results. We have reconstructed and described the representations about the work of the PC of three groups of users — schoolchildren (N = 22), programmers (N = 22) and ordinary adults without special education (N = 21) as multidimensional spaces of descriptions of the work of the PC. We identified the bases of classification of PC operation descriptions for each group of users and develop a technology for analyzing the results of studying their representations about PC as latent characteristics that form the basis of classification of PC operation descriptions.

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