Qualitatively, pre-framework talk concentrated on a limited subset of subdimensions (embodiment, control, abstraction). Once introduced, participants articulated and prioritized all nine subdimensions, enabling finer distinctions (e.g., conceptual authorship vs. physical production) and revealing medium-dependent nuances.

Participants also found the categories legible, and a recurrent split emerged between person-focused and process-focused practices. Employment context further moderated ownership: low-ownership projects were often job-driven, whereas high-ownership projects skewed toward self-initiated work. These findings support modeling ownership as a multi-dimensional profile with moderators rather than a single latent factor.

Pre-framework interviews concentrated on Embodiment, Control, and Abstraction. With the framework in view, attention distributed across all nine dimensions. Quantitatively, high-ownership cases exhibited higher overall scores, whereas low-ownership cases showed greater dispersion. Taken together, these patterns indicate that the framework broadens the analytic space of ownership and supports the capture of heterogeneous routes to ownership, particularly in low-ownership contexts.

Overall, these results demonstrate both the coverage and diagnostic power of the framework: all nine sub-dimensions shifted between conditions, and the variance patterns in the low ownership condition surfaced the diverse ways participants experience reduced ownership.

Responses for low-ownership projects showed substantially greater variance, with wider inter-quartile ranges and more outliers than in the high-ownership condition. Whereas ratings for high-ownership projects clustered tightly at the upper end of the scale, low-ownership responses spanned nearly the full range, from near zero to moderately high values. This indicates that while participants converge on what constitutes high ownership, experiences of low ownership are more heterogeneous, reflecting different ways ownership may be diminished (e.g., limited control, lack of recognition, or minimal effort).

Across all nine sub-dimensions of the framework—Embodiment, Occupancy, Recognition, Control, Intentionality, Effort, Production, Abstraction, and Interdependence—participants gave consistently higher ratings for projects they associated with high ownership compared to low ownership (Figure 2). This pattern held across the board, suggesting that the framework reliably distinguishes between ownership conditions rather than capturing isolated dimensions.

Behavior change gener-ally refers to observing a permanent change in a person’s actions.