A Nine-Item Questionnaire for Measuring the Social Disfordance of Mediated Social Touch Technologies

Abstract

Mediated Social Touch (MST) technologies focus on enhancing a communication experience by sensing, transmitting, and simulating social touch between remote partners. With interest in developing MST technologies continuing to grow, it is important to create standardized methods for measuring the effect of these novel systems. This work discusses the design and validation a 9-item questionnaire to measure the "Social Disfordance" of Mediated Social Touch, with three scales that focus on Social Discomfort, Communicational Expressiveness, and Need for Additional Consideration. A high degree of "social disfordance" of an MST system signifies that it may not provide the appropriate social affordances for mediating touch in a particular context. The development of the Social Disfordance of Mediated Social Touch (SDMST) instrument included a systematic literature review, expert feedback, and think-out-loud piloting that resulted in an initial set of 49 questions to be deployed in a large-scale study. Its refinement included an exploratory factor analysis with a subsequent reduction of questions and scales. The final questionnaire, with three scales and three questions each , was created using the data from 114 participants. Included is a report of its psychometric properties, including metrics of inter-item reliability, convergent validity, and test-retest validity, confirming that these properties are sufficient for future use. It concludes with examples of scoring, appropriate use, a discussion of the limitations and future work. As is a limitation for many questionnaires, the SDMSTQ should be used in addition to other validated measures in order to help create a full evaluation of a system.