Chapter 5 128 So it seems that the virtual coach should make it clear to the client that Validation does not involve the act of giving in to cravings itself, but rather hinges on the client’s feelings of regret, or disgust or revulsion after giving in to cravings. The Dialectical coaching strategy seems to get the best marks for both the problem situations. This style of coaching does well in the practitioner’s office [40, 42, 48], but seems to be applicable online as well. The Dialectical strategy should be more sharply emphasized to indicate that the Validation part of this coaching strategy has its focus on the client’s feelings of regret, or disgust or revulsion after giving in to cravings rather than the act of giving in to the cravings. Limitations of this study Using personas is an efficient way to provide insights into how respondents relate to matters. They were generous in sharing their opinions on both the personas and the suggested coaching responses from the virtual coach [22]. It might be advisable to include an additional round of verification to validate the personas with future users before conducting such a study. In that case, certain limitations of the current personas would have been revealed earlier, such as: 1 The personas differed from one another in terms of socioeconomic status, background and level of education, 2 It is not fully clear why participants did or did not recognize themselves in a persona, 3 The photos shown may have been too determinative. These factors may have affected the study’s internal validity. In future studies it is recommended that personas differ less from each other in personrelated data such as socioeconomic status and background, but making the personas more comparable might have impact on the heterogeneity. Systematic methods have since been developed that underpin this problem [80-81]. By using the computational method silhouette clustering a better consistency of personas could be achieved. When developing personas, it is important to strive for uniformity in personal profile and background to prevent participants from letting outward appearances influence their choices. The percentages of recognition of the problem situations ‘experiencing cravings’ and ‘after giving in to cravings’ did not seem high. The explanation may be that we have imposed a strict standard in converting the 4 answer categories to 2 dichotomous
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