Empirical evaluation methodology for embodied conversational agents

The objective of this chapter is to identify the common knowledge and practice in research methodology and to apply it to the field of software evaluation, especially of embodied conversational agents. Relevant issues discussed are: how to formulate a good research question, what research strategy to use, which data collection methods are most appropriate and how to select the right participants. Reliability and validity of the data sets are dealt with and finally the chapter concludes with a list of guidelines that one should keep in mind when setting up and conducting empirical evaluation studies on embodied conversational agents.