Chapter 7 208 Strengths and limitations The research presented in this thesis has several strenghts and limitations. As a first strength, we experienced that using personas in the vignette method worked well to present participants with real-life personas and situations with which they could identify. We tested this by asking participants whether they could relate to the presented real-life personas. The recognisability of the content in their own daily life created a safe and valid environment to reflect on the stories. Secondly, we were able to reach the target audience and experience that they were very approachable. The participants from our surveys provided us with a lot of useful information about the presentation of the coaching strategies and the execution of the emotion regulation exercises. They were generous in sharing their opinions and they were sincere and open in giving their constructive feedback. A first limitation of this study’s set up may be the limitations in developing the persona “experiencing cravings”. It might have been 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 (such as differed from one another in terms of socioeconomic status, background, and level of education) of the current personas would have been revealed earlier. Secondly, a potential limitation may have been that participants were not asked if they knew of any other proto-typical problem situations. Thirdly, a limitation of the study was that the participants were all women, which implies that the results can only be applied and generalized to female clients of virtual coaching. Lastly, in Chapter 2 we introduced the ‘CeHRes roadmap’: “Development is guided by the CeHRes roadmap (Center for eHealth & Wellbeing Research, University of Twente)” We only applied the roadmap to conduct a contextual inquiry. In Chapter 3 we introduced Persuasive Technology: “We selected the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model [24] for translating behaviour change techniques from DBT into persuasive coaching strategies [25].” Due to our focus on content, we made the decision to postpone the PSD approach for future research. Our primary focus was on understanding the needs of the target group regarding coaching, and emotion regulation skills. Future research will aim to investigate the optimal design of persuasive technology for different user profiles.
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