Department of Human and Engineered Environmental Studies, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwanoha 5-1-5, Chiba 277-8563, Japan.
Faculty of Service Management, Bunri University of Hospitality, 311-1, Kashiwabara-shinden, Sainatama 350-1336, Japan.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 May 22;20(10):5915. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20105915.
Every research participant has their own personality characteristics. For example, older adults assisted by socially assistive robots (SAR) may have their own unique characteristics and may not be representative of the general population of older adults. In this research, we compared the average personality characteristics of participants in a workshop on robotics recruited directly through posting with those of older Japanese adults to examine participant selection bias and group representativeness for future study of SARs. After a one-week recruitment period, the workshop was attended by 20 older participants (nine males and 11 females) aged between 62 and 86 years. Extroversion among workshop participants was 4.38, 0.40 higher than the average for older adults in Japan. The workshop participants' openness was 4.55, 1.09 higher than the average for the Japanese elderly. Thus, the results indicate a slight selection bias in the personal characteristics of the participants depending on the recruitment method when compared to the Japan national average for older adults. In addition, only one of 20 participants was below the cutoff on the LSNS-6 score and considered to have a tendency toward social isolation. The development and introduction of socially assistive robots is often being considered to support people in social isolation in their daily lives; however, the results of this study showed that it is difficult to recruit people who tend to be socially isolated when gathering research participants by methods such as posting. Therefore, the effectiveness of the method of recruiting participants should be carefully verified in research regarding socially assistive robots.
每位研究参与者都有其独特的个性特征。例如，使用社交辅助机器人（SAR）的老年人可能具有自己独特的特征，而这些特征可能无法代表老年人的一般群体。在这项研究中，我们比较了通过张贴方式直接招募的机器人研讨会参与者的平均人格特征与日本老年人的平均特征，以检查参与者选择偏差和 SAR 未来研究的群体代表性。经过一周的招募期，有 20 名老年人参加了研讨会（男性 9 名，女性 11 名），年龄在 62 岁至 86 岁之间。与会者的外向性得分为 4.38，比日本老年人的平均水平高 0.40。研讨会参与者的开放性得分为 4.55，比日本老年人的平均水平高 1.09。因此，与日本老年人的全国平均水平相比，根据招募方法，参与者的个人特征存在轻微的选择偏差。此外，在 20 名参与者中，只有 1 名参与者的 LSNS-6 得分低于截定点，被认为有社交孤立的倾向。社交辅助机器人的开发和引入通常被认为是为了支持日常生活中社交孤立的人；然而，这项研究的结果表明，当通过张贴等方式招募研究参与者时，很难招募到那些有社交孤立倾向的人。因此，在社交辅助机器人相关研究中，应仔细验证参与者招募方法的有效性。
