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Understanding Individual Differences in Users’ Preferences and Responses to an Intelligent Virtual Advisor for Reducing Study Stress

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Advances in Information Systems Development

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 34))

Abstract

A good teacher knows each student as an individual and encourages them accordingly. An Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) designed to provide tailored educational and emotional support also needs to reason and respond according to individual student differences. To collect data to develop models of individual differences in students’ preferences and responses to IVAs based on gender, personality and emotional state, we conducted a study with 376 participants using two different virtual advisors (one empathic, one neutral) to “Reduce Study Stress”. The experiment consisted of a control group who received tips via pdf documents and two experimental groups designed with one within-subjects factor (virtual advisors with empathic or neutral dialogue) and one between-subjects factor (different order of receiving empathic and neutral advisors). We also collected students perception of the advisors’ helpfulness and the students’ study stress levels at three time points. Groups using the IVAs reported significantly lower levels of study stress at the end of the study. Some differences were found in preferences for and responses to IVA behaviour based on participants’ gender, personality and levels of depression, anxiety and stress.

A prior version of this paper has been published in the ISD2018 Proceedings (http://aisel.aisnet.org/isd2014/proceedings2018).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ipip.ori.org/InterpretingIndividualIPIPScaleScores.htm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    H. Ranjbartabar & D. Richards

Authors
  1. H. Ranjbartabar
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  2. D. Richards
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to H. Ranjbartabar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Bo Andersson

  2. School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Björn Johansson

  3. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Chris Barry

  4. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Michael Lang

  5. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Henry Linger

  6. Information Systems Department, IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Christoph Schneider

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Ranjbartabar, H., Richards, D. (2019). Understanding Individual Differences in Users’ Preferences and Responses to an Intelligent Virtual Advisor for Reducing Study Stress. In: Andersson, B., Johansson, B., Barry, C., Lang, M., Linger, H., Schneider, C. (eds) Advances in Information Systems Development. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22993-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22993-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-22992-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22993-1

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