An Open-Source Smartphone Screen-Recording Tool with Application to Political Science Research

Daniel Muise, Justin Cornelius, Jihye Lee, Yingdan Lu and Jacob N Shapiro
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Yingdan Lu: Northwestern University

No 6wgm5_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Political scientists seek to understand the political environment and to identify causal relationships within it. This often requires accurate measurement of how individuals consume political information. Many data-collection approaches, particularly those relying on social media content, infer consumption behavior from publicly posted material. Yet public-facing, platform-specific content misrepresents the fragmented, multimedia nature of smartphone use, and thus of political information consumption. Continuous smartphone screen-recording (CSSR) offers a theoretically strong means of capturing individuals’ information experience, but has remained largely inaccessible to political scientists due to technical, operational, analytical, and ethical barriers. We introduce an open-source CSSR tool to mitigate these challenges. We motivate its relevance for political science and outline its solutions to practical constraints that have limited CSSR’s adoption.

Date: 2026-04-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:6wgm5_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/6wgm5_v1

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