What Do Children Want from a Social Robot? Toward Gratifications Measures for Child-Robot Interaction*

Social robots have, in the case of children, rarely been studied from a uses-and-gratifications perspective. As social robots differ from more traditional media, the first aim of this study was to explore the gratifications that children seek and obtain from social robots. This was investigated in a study among 87 children. The second aim was to develop and initially validate measures for those gratifications. We studied this among a sample of 24 children. The measures for hedonic and social gratifications-obtained worked reasonably well. The measures for hedonic and informative gratifications-sought seemed problematic, whereas the others were acceptable. Our measures present a first step toward enabling future research on children’s gratifications of social robots.

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