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.