Communication in IT-supported Advice Giving
Description
Mutual understanding is one of the prerequisites of a successful advisory session, be it a financial service encounter at the bank or crime prevention session at home. Improving mutual understanding with a dedicated IT may be, therefore, a rewarding undertaking. However, IT may also cause problems - studies show that IT may capture much of the collaborators' attention which would be otherwise available for the direct conversation.
Understanding the role of IT in conversation emerging during advisory sessions is a major task of research in this area. Understanding the positive and negative effects of IT on conversation may positively influence the overall quality of the advice-giving process. In particular, we seek to understand how IT changes the words used by the advisor and his or her client.
Task
We are looking for students with strong interest for multidisciplinary questions. If you like to think out of the box this is the right topic for you: You will be able to combine knowledge about collaboration, language, and technology in one assignment. As you will assist us at quantitative analysis of the results, you shall be willing to review and use some of your statistics skills. We expect this research to describe the role of IT in vocabulary development in advisory sessions. Furthermore, its results shall inform interventions that successfully support advisors at providing more valuable and enjoyable service encounters.
In particular, you will annotate and analyze videos collected in a number of experiments, where dedicated IT systems were used to support advice provision at financial institutions. You will conduct quantitative analysis of the vocabulary used in the material to assess its richness and character, and how it changes over the course of the conversation. Based on this, you will be able to answer such questions as the following:
- What are the effects of the IT on the conversation between the advisor and the advisee?
- How do the various features of the advisee's and advisor's behavior relate to the design of IT?
- What types of adaptations (e.g., lexical adaptations, behavior adaptations, speaking pace adaptations) do occur in IT-supported and traditional advisory sessions?
- What are the possible improvements to the existing software or processes?
While we open the topic for Bachelor and Master theses, in a reduced form, it also fits the concept of an in-depth thesis ("Vertiefungsarbeit" or "Facharbeit").
