Questionnaire Items for Evaluating Artificial Social Agents - Expert Generated, Content Validated and Reliability Analysed

Abstract

In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 90 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practice in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social agent (ASA). The joint efforts have previously generated a unified set of 19 constructs that capture more than 80% of constructs used in empirical studies published in the IVA conference between 2013 to 2018. In this paper, we present expert-content-validated 131 questionnaire items for the constructs and their dimensions, and investigate the level of reliability. We establish this in three phases. Firstly, eight experts generated 431 potential construct items. Secondly, 20 experts rated whether items measure (only) their intended construct, resulting in 207 content-validated items. Next, a reliability analysis was conducted, involving 192 crowd-workers who were asked to rate a human interaction with an ASA, which resulted in 131 items (about 5 items per measurement, with Cronbach's alpha ranged [.60 -- .87]). These are the starting points for the questionnaire instrument of human-ASA interaction.