A Nine-Item Questionnaire for Measuring the Social Disfordance of Mediated Social Touch Technologies

University of Minnesota M.S.M.E. thesis.May 2017. Major: Mechanical Engineering. Advisors: Svetlana Yarosh, William Durfee. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 50 pages.Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies focus on enhancing a communication experience by sensing, transmitting, and simulating social touch between remote partners. With interest in developing MST technologies continuing to grow, it is important to create standardized methods for measuring the effect of these novel systems. This work discusses the design and validation a 9-item questionnaire to measure the "Social Disfordance" of Mediated Social Touch, with three scales that focus on Social Discomfort, Communicational Expressiveness, and Need for Additional Consideration. A high degree of "social disfordance" of an MST system signifies that it may not provide the appropriate social affordances for mediating touch in a particular context. The development of the Social Disfordance of Mediated Social Touch (SDMST) instrument included a systematic literature review, expert feedback, and think-out-loud piloting that resulted in an initial set of 49 questions to be deployed in a large-scale study. Its refinement included an exploratory factor analysis with a subsequent reduction of questions and scales. The final questionnaire, with three scales and three questions each , was created using the data from 114 participants. Included is a report of its psychometric properties, including metrics of inter-item reliability, convergent validity, and test-retest validity, confirming that these properties are sufficient for future use. It concludes with examples of scoring, appropriate use, a discussion of the limitations and future work. As is a limitation for many questionnaires, the SDMSTQ should be used in addition to other validated measures in order to help create a full evaluation of a system

Quantifying Meaningful Interaction: Developing the Eudaimonic Technology Experience Scale

Recent research has shown that users increasingly seek meaning in technologies and that eudaimonic user experience (UX) is part of everyday encounters with technology. Yet, to date, there is no validated means to assess eudaimonic properties in interactive artefacts. We conceptualised, developed and validated a six-item questionnaire for measuring eudaimonic properties of technologies—the Eudaimonic Technology Experience Scale (ETES). Our scale includes two factors, which describe what aspects of a eudaimonic experience can be supported by technology: eudaimonic goals and self-knowlege. We consulted work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), psychology and philosophy to gather an initial set of concepts that could contribute to eudaimonic UX. We then built the scale based on expert interviews and exploratory factor analysis and verified its quality in a number of tests (confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity checks). ETES provides a standardised tool for identifying eudaimonic qualities in interactive systems and allows for rapidly comparing prototypes

Proc ACM Hum Comput Interact

Participation in communities is essential to individual mental and physical health and can yield further benefits for members. With a growing amount of time spent participating in virtual communities, it's increasingly important that we understand how the community experience manifests in and varies across these online spaces. In this paper, we investigate Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) in the context of live-streaming communities. Through a survey of 1,944 Twitch viewers, we identify that community experiences on Twitch vary along two primary dimensions: |, a feeling of membership and support within the group, and |, a feeling that the group is a well-run collective with standards for behavior. Leveraging the Social-Ecological Model, we map behavioral trace data from usage logs to various levels of the social ecology surrounding an individual user's participation within a community, in order to identify which of these can be associated with lower or higher SOVC. We find that features describing activity at the individual and community levels, but not features describing the community member's dyadic relationships, aid in predicting the SOVC that community members feel within channels. We consider implications for the design of live-streaming communities and for fostering the well-being of their members, and we consider theoretical implications for the study of SOVC in modern, interactive online contexts, particularly those fostering large-scale or pseudonymized interactions. We also explore how the Social-Ecological Model can be leveraged in other contexts relevant to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), with implications for future work.CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States