Research Study for Understanding the Futures of Conversational Agents

 

Lead Researcher

Dr. Radhika Garg, Assistant Professor

School of Information Studies

 (315)-443-5610, rgarg01@syr.edu

 

 

I am interested in recruiting parents or legal guardians (in the age group: 31-64) and children (in the age group: 13-17 and not turning 18 in next 10 weeks) for a study that we plan to conduct. We aim to understand your and your child’s preferences about how the conversational agents, i.e., a computer system that is able to converse with people and help them in their tasks, should be like in the future, let’s say, 30-40 years from now.

 

Parents/Legal guardians and children will participate in nine activities over the period of eight weeks. We estimate it will take 20 minutes each week to complete the activities. Activities will include survey completion, diary reflections, story completion, creating video or writing a movie script, and co-design sessions, i.e., brainstorming about future technology with your child. You and your child will each be given an Amazon gift card of $5 for every week that you both participate in the study. If you decide to withdraw from any of these activities at any stage, you will still be compensated for the week you started to take part in. At the end of the eight week period, both parent and children will be asked to participate in an exit interview that we estimate to take between 30 to 60 minutes. You and your child will each be given an Amazon gift card of $10 for participating in the interview. Overall, you and your child can each earn up to $50 for participating in this study for a maximum time commitment of 20 minutes/week for 8 weeks plus one exit interview that will take a maximum of one hour.

 

If you are a parent of a child, who is between 13-17 and not turning 18 in next 10 weeks, and are interested in participating along with your child, please send an email to our research team, rgarg01@syr.edu. Also, we will be recruiting only those participants who are residing in U.S, both parents/legal guardians and the child have their own smart phones and email addresses. We would be delighted to have you as a participant in our study. The study will be conducted remotely through the communication platform of Slack, wherein you will be added to a private group with other parent-teen dyads participating in the study. Finally, note that parents/legal guardians and children will be interviewed separately.

 

Will you be interested to participate in this study?