Raw data underlying the PhD thesis: Advancing Repairability in Consumer Electronics: Design Guidelines and Evaluation Methods

Contains the raw data files used in Dissertation: Advancing Repairability in Consumer Electronics: Design Guidelines and Evaluation Methods by Sagar Dangal. Its overarching aim is to develop design guidelines and evaluation methods that improve fault diagnosis, disassembly assessment and repairability scoring, thereby enabling longer product lifetimes and supporting right to repair policies. This dissertation comprises four core chapters, each addressing a part of research objective through varied methodological approaches. Chapter 3 investigates how end-users with different repair experience diagnose faults in consumer appliances and how design features influence this process. It adopts a qualitative user observation study involving 24 participants, who diagnosed faults in four products while thinking aloud, supported by video recordings and interviews, yielding verbal, behavioral, and interview data. Chapter 4 develops the Disassembly and Reassembly Time (DaRT) model to provide a time-based, scalable, and accurate method for assessing ease of disassembly across appliances. This chapter is grounded in quantitative research, based on over 10,000 disassembly actions from 52 products performed by professional technicians, resulting in a numerical dataset for statistical modeling. Chapter 5 evaluates the objectivity and completeness of six major repairability scoring systems by comparing their criteria to empirically established design principles. This study uses qualitative content analysis to assess whether the systems comprehensively cover key repairability features and whether their scoring methods are clearly defined and operator-independent. Chapter 6 empirically tests the validity and reliability of three widely used scoring systems by applying them to 16 products and comparing the outcomes under best- and worst-case scenarios against DaRT timings. This chapter combines experimental and comparative methods, generating both quantitative scores and qualitative observations to assess consistency and accuracy in representing real-world repair effort. <br>The folders are arranged per chapter, details on raw data of each chapter can be found in README file of the chapter folder.<br><br>