Immediacy Scale Resources and References
This page is dedicated to holding my resources and information relating to the concepts of verbal and nonverbal immediacy (as defined by Albert Mehrabian in 1968). I have developed a number of immediacy questionnaires with my colleagues Paul Baxter and Tony Belpaeme, that are based on those found in the communication studies literature. The scales developed by our team have been modified to be used with robots and children, as well as adults. They feature in various publications that I have written. If you use one of the scales in a study you run, it would be appreciated if you could reference the suggested paper for that scale - typically this is where I first use or validate it. :-)Download: Robot Nonverbal Immediacy Questionnaire (RNIQ)
This questionnaire is based on the short-form observer nonverbal immediacy report as developed by Richmond et al. (1998). The calculation for the immediacy score is the same as that seen on James McCroskey's website: score each item 1-->5 where 1="Never"-->5="Very Often", then NI = 48 + (SUM(Q1,3,7,8,9,11,14,15)) - (SUM(Q2,4,5,6,10,12,13,16)). The questionnaire uses `child-friendly' wording.My suggested reference (check my publications page for a free copy):
Higher Nonverbal Immediacy Leads to Greater Learning Gains in Child-Robot Tutoring Interactions (2015) J. Kennedy; P. Baxter; E. Senft; T. Belpaeme
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kennedy2015higher,
title={{Higher Nonverbal Immediacy Leads to Greater Learning Gains in Child-Robot Tutoring Interactions}},
author={Kennedy, James and Baxter, Paul and Senft, Emmanuel and Belpaeme, Tony},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics},
series = {ICSR '15},
year={2015},
location={Paris, France}
}
Download: Robot Immediacy Questionnaire (RIQ)
This questionnaire combines several concepts including verbal immediacy, nonverbal immediacy and perceived task ability. The scale is based on the work of Gorham (1988), Wilson and Locker (2007), and Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) research (see the IMI webpage, work by McAuley et al. (1989), and Duckworth et al. (2011)). Questions 1-14 consider verbal immediacy, 15-20 nonverbal immediacy, 21-22 perceived ability, and 23 relational attitude. It should be noted that the wording for many of the questions has been modified from the originals to make them more easily understood by children. Question 15 needs further modification as many children (aged 8 or 9) didn't understand it; it is suggested that the addition of 'using its hands and arms' could be a solution, as seen in the first question of the RNIQ which didn't suffer from this problem. Some verbal immediacy questions have also been removed as they were deemed inappropriate for the one-on-one tutoring context in which the questionnaire was used.My suggested reference (check my publications page for a free copy):
Social Robot Tutoring for Child Second Language Learning (2016) J. Kennedy; P. Baxter; E. Senft; T. Belpaeme
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kennedy2016language,
title={{Social Robot Tutoring for Child Second Language Learning}},
author={Kennedy, James and Baxter, Paul and Senft, Emmanuel and Belpaeme, Tony},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
series = {HRI '16},
year={2016},
location={Christchurch, New Zealand}
}