This is the analysis code underlying the paper "Virtual Coaching for Smoking Cessation: What are Users Preference in Ethical Principles for Human Feedback Allocation" by Glebs Labunskis, Nele Albers, and Willem-Paul Brinkman. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of people's preferences of ethical principles that a virtual assistant for smoking cessation should follow for deciding how to allocate human feedback.
Data:
Our analysis is based on the data collected in an online experiment in which more than 500 daily smokers interacted with the text-based virtual coach (i.e., a conversational agent) in up to 5 sessions. In each session, the virtual assistant proposed a new preparatory activity for quitting smoking or becoming more physically active, with the latter possibly aiding the former. After the 5 sessions, participants filled in a post-questionnaire in which they answered a set of questions. Our paper focuses on people's free-text responses to the question "When a human coach cannot give feedback to everybody after each session due to time constraints, which principles/rules do you think the virtual coach should follow to decide when a human coach should give feedback to people who are preparing to quit smoking?". The complete dataset can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/78CNR.
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