Agency lit review pre-print

We recently investigated how the HCI community treats agency in child-AI interaction, which we report in our paper Agency in Child-AI Interaction: A Review of How It Is Conceptualised, Studied, and Supported in HCI.

We reviewed 25 recent HCI papers, finding that agency is rarely explicitly defined and its conceptualisation varies, including views of agency as something children innately possess, something under threat, and something to be developed. Our literature mapping shows that researchers observed agency through children’s choice-making, expressions of controls, and abilities to critique. The conditions reported by researchers that enable or constrain agency span cognitive understanding, system and study design, and the social environment. Our review highlights gaps in research on designing for children’s agency, and we advocate for conceptual clarity by drawing upon existing frameworks and highlight the importance of considering children’s agency through a relational lens.

This work is funded by the UKRI CHAILD project.