Exploring Communicative Modes for a Virtual Environment: A Social Psychological Analysis

This paper reports from an experimental study of cooperative work in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) with sixty test subjects. A method from social psychology, interaction process analysis (IPA), was used for analyzing group dynamics within the CVE in relation to three communicative modes: text-chat, voice, and video conferencing. The study investigated how the communicative mode influenced the quality of the social interaction and how cooperative work in a CVE could be analyzed by using categories of social interaction. It was found that the frequencies of utterances in the voice and video conferencing conditions were significantly larger than in the text-chat condition. The dialogue of the text-chat condition was found to be more task oriented than the dialogues of the voice and video conferencing condition. The social psychological method used was not developed for use within CVE:s, but it was found to work well since the scope of the IPA method is broad and applicable to virtually any small group.