Margot van der Goot is Assistant Professor Persuasive Communication at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. Margot van der Goot’s research is first and foremost driven by her fascination for people’s interpretations, perceptions, drives, goals, emotions, and meanings of life, and by the overall question how people respond to various forms of persuasive communication. She is eager to further refine concepts that are used in communication research. Although she also conducts quantitative research, qualitative research is most close to her heart. A specific target group of interest in her research are older adults because life-span theory strongly suggests age differences in responses to persuasive communication.
Her current research focuses on human-machine communication, and more specifically on users' perceptions of interactions with conversational agents.
Her first publication in this research line explores age differences in motivations for and acceptance of chatbot communication in a customer service context (Van der Goot & Pilgrim, 2020).
In 2019, Margot received funding for a qualitative study into consumers’ experiences of chatbot communication by winning Logeion’s Strategic Communication Challenge 2019. Interviews have been conducted with the help of Ruigrok Netpanel. The results can be found in this infographic and the paper presenting the results received a top paper nomination.
In 2020, she received a grant from the RPA Human(e) AI, for a project on the adaptation of conversational systems to different age groups, together with Raquel Fernández and Sandro Pezzelle (Faculty of Science). More information about the project can be found here.
Examples of previous research projects:
- Qualitative interview studies into how practitioners and youngsters perceive the use of disclosures in online sponsored content (project with Eva van Reijmersdal). The interview study with youngsters has been conducted in collaboration with the “Commissariaat voor de Media” and is used in the development of the “Social Code: YouTube”, and the practitioner study is published open access in the Journal of Media Ethics.
Margot teaches in the BA and MA program Communication Science, particularly courses on qualitative research methods and marketing communication.
She serves as vice-president of NeFCA (the Netherlands-Flanders Communication Association) and as secretary for the ICA interest group Human-Machine Communication.