Towards a computer interview acceptable to the naïve user

✍ Scribed by V. Spiliotopoulos; B. Shackel

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1981
• Weight: 746 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(81)80034-x

✦ Synopsis

This paper reports an analysis and three experiments in the field of man-computer interviewing.

To explore the importance of the linguistic format of the questions in a computer interview, four history-taking interviewing programs were analysed. These programs had already been used successfully in a computer system to carry out friendly and natural interviews. In this analysis the major variations in phraseology were found to be represented by two variables, namely Encouragement and Chattiness.

Three experiments are then described.aiming to test the usefulness of these two variables in a man-computer interviewing situation and to compare this with the man-man interviewing situation.

The conclusions from these experiments are: (a) during a computer interview context-free Encouragement and Chattiness, used randomly and to a moderate extent, seem to provide an optimum format for acceptability, but (b) in human interviews random Encouragement and Chattiness seem to have no effect on people's acceptance, while the random Encouragement might even have a negative effect.