Benefiting from Tracking Yourself by Knowing Yourself

Self-tracking technologies are being increasingly integrated into everyday activities, capturing data and presenting information to users regarding their states, status and performance through feedback messages. Interaction with these features can be seen as beneficial for users, but also as tedious and oppressive. To address this issue, we bring attention to the antecedents of the individual’s net benefits from these devices’ usage. This study aims at putting forward the relationship between the clarity and coherence of an individual’s beliefs toward themselves in IT usage situations, the framing of feedback messages and net benefits. To do this, we adapt the conceptualization of self-concept clarity (SCC) from the psychology field to the context of IT, creating the ITSCC construct. We propose a positive effect of ITSCC on net benefits, moderated by feedback message framing. We then propose an experimental design and procedure to test our model