Data from: Social robots as conversational catalysts: Enhancing long-term human-human dyadic interaction at home

The integration of social robots into family environments raises critical
questions about their long-term influence on family interactions. This
study explores the potential of social robots as conversational catalysts
in human-human dyadic interaction, focusing on enhancing high-quality,
reciprocal conversations between parents and children during dialogic
co-reading activities. With the increasing prevalence of social robots in
homes and the recognized importance of parent-child exchanges for
children's developmental milestones, this work presents a
comprehensive empirical investigation involving over 70 parent-child
dyads. We examined the effects of three robot interaction styles: a
passive robot listener, an active robot with a fixed behavior strategy,
and an active robot with a strategy-switching mechanism on parent-child
conversational dynamics. Our findings reveal that a robot's active
participation enhances the quality of parent-child dialogic conversations.
Notably, the impact of robot facilitation varied based on parental English
proficiency. Strategy-switching robots provided greater benefits to
non-native English-speaking families, while dyads with native
English-speaking parents benefited more from fixed-strategy robots.
Overall, this study highlights the promise of social robots that empower
parents in fostering their children's dialogic development—a contrast
to the prevalent design of educational robots that primarily target
children. It provides critical insights for the equitable, nuanced design
of long-term family-robot interactions at home, especially in supporting
diverse family backgrounds.