Effects of Embodied Interviewing Agents on Open Narrative Responses

Open narrative questions in web surveys have the great potential to obtain rich and in-depth information from respondents. However, open narrative questions administered through web surveys frequently suffer from short, uninterpretable, or no responses at all. This especially applies to mobile web surveys, such as smartphone surveys, bearing the risk of not obtaining sufficient information to answer the research question(s) under investigation. Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) make it possible to enhance respondents’ web survey experience by resembling in-person interactions in a self-administered setting. Building on these advances, we investigate web surveys in which open narrative questions are asked through embodied interviewing agents, incorporating features of in-person interviews in web surveys. While the presence of an interviewing agent can encourage more considerate and meaningful responses, it can also introduce social desirability. In this study, we therefore address the following research question: How do embodied interviewing agents affect responses to sensitive open narrative questions? We conducted a mobile web survey and randomly assigned respondents to interviewing agents varying in gender (male or female) or a text-based web survey interface without an agent. We employed two open narrative questions on sensitive topics: one on women’s role in the workplace and one on family relations. The results of the quantitative text analyses indicate that there are no differences with respect to response length. However, open narrative responses to the male interviewing agent include more topics. There are no differences when it comes to sentiments (or extremity of responses), indicating that social desirability plays a minor role.