Assessing Children's Perceptions and Acceptance of a Social Robot

Abstract

Children's interactions with social robots and other technologies are increasingly longitudinal, especially in areas such as healthcare, therapy, and education. As such, we need to understand how children perceive social robots over time and the kinds of relationships they develop. Relatively few validated assessments exist that measure young children's relationships or their perception and acceptance of social robots. Thus, we present pilot tests of two assessments created for use with children aged 4-7: the Picture Sorting Task and the Social Acceptance Questionnaire. Through a singlesession study and also a long-term study, we found that children responded appropriately to the assessments and that the assessments could capture changes in children's perception and relationship over multiple encounters.