Principal investigators: Rebecca Wald, Jessica Piotrowski, Theo Araujo, Johanna M.F. van Oosten
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam
Summary: Smart speakers, such as Google Home or Alexa Echo, have become increasingly popular in family houesholds over the past years – also in the Netherlands (Wald, Piotrowski, van Oosten, et al., 2024). Given that media use in families is known to impact children’s further upbringing and development (Arora & Arora, 2022; Valkenburg & Piotrowski, 2017) and that the integration of such smart devices in intimate spaces like families has broader implications for the design and regulation of the technology (Wald et al., 2023), it is crucial to learn more about how families concretely use these devices at home. Thus far, two main types of measurements have most often been used to assess smart speaker use: self-reports of users and actual registered interactions with the smart speaker. Yet, both measurements of smart speaker use have not yet been compared in research, leaving open to what extent they align, are feasible to obtain, and based on that are best suitable in what research scenario. The overarching aim of ‘The Google Family Home’ study is therefore to understand to what extent there is a systematic difference between self-reported (via survey) and observed smart speaker use (via data donations), and how Dutch families with young children actually use smart speakers at home, that is how frequently the device is used (use-frequency), for what activity (use-purpose), and by whom in the family (use-form) (Wald, van Oosten, Piotrowski, et al., 2024).
References
Arora, A., & Arora, A. (2022). Effects of smart voice control devices on children: Current challenges and future perspectives. Archives of Disease in Childhood, archdischild-2022-323888. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2022-323888
Valkenburg, P. M., & Piotrowski, J. T. (2017). Plugged in: How media attract and affect youth. Yale University Press.
Wald, R., Piotrowski, J. T., Araujo, T., & Van Oosten, J. M. F. (2023). Virtual assistants in the family home. Understanding parents’ motivations to use virtual assistants with their child(dren). Computers in Human Behavior, 139, 107526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107526
Wald, R., Piotrowski, J. T., Van Oosten, J. M. F., & Araujo, T. (2024). Who are the (non-)adopters of smart speakers? A cross-sectional survey study of Dutch families. Tijdschrift Voor Communicatiewetenschap, 51. https://doi.org/10.5117/TCW2023.X.001.WALD
Wald, R., Van Oosten, J. M. F., Piotrowski, J. T., & Araujo, T. (2024). Smart Speaker Data Donations in Families: The Project Rosie Perspective. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’24), June 17–20, 2024, Delft, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3659374
Data collection period: May – June 2024
Participant recruitment: Participants were recruited through Motivaction.
Instructions: Instructions to perform the data access and download will be shared upon completion of the data collection and once the dataset is anonymized.
Survey: This study included a questionnaire that was distributed by Motivaction. The contens of the questionnaire will be made available on OSF upon completion of the data collection.
Ethical review: The study was approved by the university’s Ethics Review Board under reference FMG-8809 on 26-04-2024. For each participants, invitation letter, consent form, and privacy policy were accessible in the survey as well as the data donation interface.
Software: The data donations were collected using Port.
Local processing: The Python script for local processing of the Google Assistant data will be made available on GitHub (linked to within the OSF-project) upon completion of the data collection.
Data: The anonimized dataset will be made available on OSF upon completion of the data collection. Please contact the PI of this study for questions/data requests.
