The Effect of Training Communication Medium on the Social Constructs Co-Presence, Engagement, Rapport, and Trust: Explaining how training communication medium affects the social constructs co-presence, engagement, rapport, and trust.

Communication performance is highly context sensitive and difficult to quantify. In the SCOTTIE project (Systematic Communication Objectives and Telecommunications Technology Investigations and Evaluations), the goal is to investigate the impact of the communication medium on team performance and effectiveness. The human decision to travel or replace travel with telecommunications can be extracted from SCOTTIE, rather than relying on intuition and opinion. This poster analyzes four social communication constructs and compares them in Face-to-Face, Video Conferencing, and Virtual Reality training scenarios. Co-presence, engagement, rapport, and trust were the four constructs. Data from 105 participants across the three between-subject conditions showed that engagement was the only construct that had a statistically significant difference between the three training environments.