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Understanding children’s behavior in an asynchronous video-mediated communication environment

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Abstract

Video-mediated communication (VMC) has become a feasible way to connect people in remote places for work and play. Nevertheless, little research has been done with regard to children and VMC. In this paper, we explore the behavior of a group of children, who exchanged video messages in an informal context. In particular, this paper presents the results of 11-week VMC study of 30 children from the USA and Greece, exploring children’s behavior with the asynchronous video-based messaging tool we developed called VideoPal. In the study, children’s interactions, perceptions, content exchanged and emotions were collected. The results from the analyses highlight that the emotion of happiness dominated in the communication. Moreover, the content included useful personal information and is connected with children’s interactions (e.g., number of views and of recipients). In addition, children generally preferred VideoPal to email because they felt that it was easier and has more fun.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all of the children who participated in the experiment. We also thank Ilias Pappas who assisted us in the content analysis procedure. The work reported in this paper has been partly supported by Project CULT (http://cult.di.ionio.gr). CULT (MC-ERG-2008-230894) is a Marie Curie Project of the European Commission (EC) under the 7th Framework Program (FP7).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Platia Tsirigoti 7, 49100, Corfu, Greece

    Michail N. Giannakos & Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen & Paul Johns

  3. Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Honglu Du

Authors
  1. Michail N. Giannakos
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  2. Konstantinos Chorianopoulos
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  3. Kori Inkpen
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  4. Honglu Du
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  5. Paul Johns
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Correspondence to Michail N. Giannakos.

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Giannakos, M.N., Chorianopoulos, K., Inkpen, K. et al. Understanding children’s behavior in an asynchronous video-mediated communication environment. Pers Ubiquit Comput 17, 1621–1629 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0525-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0525-2

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