October 12, 2022
Meghan O'Toole
Faculty member, alumni, students co-author paper on chatbots
Assistant Professor of Psychology Vivian Ta and a group of students, some of whom have graduated since assisting on the research, recently published a scholarly article, “Assessing the Topics and Motivating Factors Behind Human-Social Chatbot Interactions: Thematic Analysis of User Experiences.”
Alumni co-authors include Carolynn Boatfield ’22, Xinyu Wang ’22, Esther DeCero ’21, Isabel Krupica ’22, and Sophie Rasof ’22. Current students Amelie Motzer ’24 and Wiktoria Pedryc ’24 are also credited as co-authors.
The article was published in JMIR Human Factors, a journal that focuses on understanding how human thinking and behavior can impact healthcare technology and innovation.
The article is a follow-up to a 2020 paper, “User Experiences of Social Support From Companion Chatbots in Everyday Contexts: Thematic Analysis.” Given the popularity of the first paper, Ta and her students sought to continue this line of research on human-chatbot interactions.
“This article shows that social chatbots are no longer a figment of science fiction,” Ta said. “People are now using social chatbots for a wide variety of reasons including mental and physical health support. This not only illustrates the versatility of social chatbots, but also hints at the potential ubiquity of social chatbots as technology continues to advance.”
Wang, currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Social Organizational Psychology at Columbia University, said that working in Ta’s lab was one of the best experiences she had at Lake Forest College: “Participating in various research projects at various stages in the lab helped me understand the entire process of turning a research question into a published article, which increased my interest in research and urged me to continue my education to pursue a master’s degree in psychology. Furthermore, those hands-on experiences working in teams and closely with professors have helped me adjust to the graduate program more quickly.”
Pedryc said the experience of working on the paper was an enriching one. “I spent over a year working on this project, and it was my first experience in the field of psychology where I was exposed to most stages of conducting a study, writing a paper, and publishing it,” Pedryc said.
For Ta, working with students not only benefits them, but also her own research timelines.
“Conducting research and writing take a very long time to complete. For any given study, I would typically collaborate with other scholars from the College or other institutions and share the workload with them,” Ta said. “However, the number of people who study human-chatbot interactions is extremely small compared to other fields. Getting students involved with the research and writing helps ease the workload. In addition, students who were involved in this study were able to gain well-rounded, hands-on experience across many areas of the research process, including research design, data analysis, writing, and presenting at conferences, rather than just one or two areas.”
The article was published on October 3, 2022.