カワイイの単一項目尺度
The Single-Item Kawaii Measure
The one-item measure of kawaii is a parsimonious way to capture user perceptions of kawaii—the Japanese instantiation of cuteness—across voice and visual stimuli. A widely used self-report measure, it has achieved initial validation.
The measure
Respondents rate “kawaii” as an attribute of a stimulus on a single Likert scale.
The one-item measure is typically folded into another instrument or alongside similar and dissimiliar descriptive items like “enjoyable” and “trustworthy.” Targets can be customized to your scenario.
Please select the most appropriate response to each of the items below. Consider each statement as a whole and evaluate how well it describes your impression. Since this evaluation concerns the voice, please do not take the system or the content of the conversation into account.
This voice felt ...
以下の項目は、あなた自身にどの程度当てはまるかについて，下のもっとも適切なものを◯に入れてください。文章全体を総合的に見て，自分にどれだけ当てはまるかを評価してください。これは声についての評価なので、システムや話の内容に関しては考慮しないでください。
この声は......と感じた。
Kawaii かわいい
For each of the following, please select the most appropriate option. 以下の項目について最も当てはまるものを選択してください。
This voice is kawaii.
この声は可愛い。
For each of the following, please select the most appropriate option. 以下の項目について最も当てはまるものを選択してください。
Do you feel that this voice is kawaii?
この声をかわいいと感じましたか？
What kawaii is
Kawaii is a multimodal percept derived from baby schema—perceived in sound and voice or appearance and movement, and potentially other sensory cues and modalities. At present, there is no validated multi-item instrument, although one is in the works. Currently, the one-item self-report measure has been used extensively in HCI work on voice assistants, conversational user interfaces, and video game characters. We have just demonstrated its initial validity in a new paper. We provide our data sets openly.
How it's been validated (so far)
Convergent validity
The single item correlated strongly with multi-item kawaii dimensions (τb from 0.49 to 0.60, all p < 0.001), with acceptable reliability (Cronbach’s α between .65 and .79).
Known-groups validity
The measure differentiated kawaii from non-kawaii stimuli as expected, showing significant moderate-to-strong correlations among kawaii voices.
Cross-context validity
The measure held across modalities (voice vs. body) and cohorts, suggesting people understand the kawaii item in a relatively similar way.
An open science initiative
Feel free to peruse the data sets at https://bit.ly/validatingkawaii
Work using the measure
Cite the validation work
The initial validation report was published as a short paper to the 2026 ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) conference. Here's how you can cite the paper:
Seaborn, Katie and Wang, Yijia. 2026. Validating the Single Item Kawaii Measure. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CUI Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI EA ’26), Bremen, Germany. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 10.1145/3816046.3816284
@inproceedings{seaborn2026oneitem,
author = {Seaborn, Katie and Wang, Yijia},
title = {Validating the Single Item Kawaii Measure},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CUI Conference on Conversational User Interfaces},
location = {Bremen, Germany},
series = {CUI EA '26},
doi = {10.1145/3816046.3816284},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3816046.3816284}
}