Abstract
Participation in phenomenology-based ethnography is about involvement and “doing-it-yourself,” which generates data derived from immediate experience that can contribute to the reconstruction of the internal viewpoint by uncovering the essence of a phenomenon. This phenomenological orientation is the main focus of interest of the present paper. Based on reflections on the ethnographer as a participant who voluntarily assumes the role of the stranger, we demonstrate how observation can be supplemented with participation. We exemplify it with an ongoing research project on the deployment of a so-called social robot in dementia care. Our aim is to show that a subjective perspective, which does not claim to be superior but rather to be of value in its own right, increases the knowledge yield.
Keywords
The hallmark of phenomenology-based ethnography is participation in the everyday life of the field that is the subject of the ethnographer’s knowledge interest. This form of ethnography distinguishes itself not only from other methods of so-called qualitative social research but also from other ethnographic approaches because participation in phenomenology-based ethnography is not merely aimed at refining observation data. Nor is it only about “being there”; about getting as close to the action as possible; about obtaining as undistorted and unrestricted a view as possible of the practices of the actors in the field. Rather, participation in phenomenology-based ethnography is about involvement and “doing it yourself,” which generates data derived from immediate experience that can contribute to the reconstruction of the internal viewpoint by uncovering the essence of a phenomenon. This phenomenological orientation, which Anne Honer (1993) labeled “life-worldly,” is the main focus of interest of the present paper. We exemplify it with an ongoing research project on the deployment of a so-called social robot in dementia care, in which the first author is participating. (In what follows, passages relating to her immediate experiences in this project are therefore written in the “I” form.)
By way of introduction, we begin by outlining the location of ethnography in general in the methodological canon of empirical social research. This is followed by some reflections on the role of the ethnographer as a “stranger.” We then focus on the ethnographer as a participant who voluntarily assumes the role of the stranger. And finally, on the basis of preliminary findings from the aforementioned research project, we exemplarily demonstrate how observation can be supplemented with participation. Our aim is to show that a subjective perspective, which does not claim to be superior but rather to be of value in its own right, increases the knowledge yield.
The Position of Ethnography in the Methodological Canon of Empirical Social Research
American cultural sociology is currently experiencing a methods dispute. The main bone of contention is interviewing—the dominant method in cultural sociology—and the dispute was launched by interactionist ethnographers, for example Jerolmack and Khan (2014). In their critique, Jerolmack and Khan focus on the disparity between “talk and action.” Declaring that “talk is cheap” and “actions speak louder than words,” they criticize not only the interview method but also the dominant concept of culture in cultural sociology. They argue that cultural sociologists, in particular, commit what they call the “attitudinal fallacy—the error of inferring situated behavior from verbal accounts” (2014, 179). The authors identify a method of escape from this fallacy, namely, “the direct observation of face-to-face-encounters in natural settings” (186).
Jerolmack and Khan also direct their criticism against an understanding of culture as “collective representations,” even when these representations are understood as an individual “cognitive tool kit”—that is, as something which is “located in individual experience” (Watkins and Swidler 2009, 162). Hence, they prescribe ethnography as a remedy for two ills befalling the sociology of culture: first, the “psychological bias” of cultural sociologists who fail to recognize “how culture is defined, created, and transmitted through interaction” (Fine 1979, 733 in Jerolmack and Khan 2014, footnote 11); and second, the privileging of interview data over observation data even in approaches such as “culture in action” (Swidler 1986) and “meaning-making” (Lamont 2000), whose labels programmatically include the words “action” or “making.”
Although Anne Honer problematized the privileging of interview data over observation data back in 1993, it would currently be highly improbable that ethnographers in Germany would make such a scathing attack on interviewing as that mounted by Jerolmack and Khan. In this country, the interview method still seems to be the undisputed “royal road” of empirical social research (König 1965, 27), and ethnographers continue to be viewed as a curious little tribe characterized more by a “savage mind” (Levi-Strauss 1966 [1962]) than by scientific endeavor bound by objectivity.
While we agree with Jerolmack and Khan’s diagnosis that empirical social researchers are susceptible to inferring situated behavior from interviewees’ accounts, we are reluctant to accept their call for these accounts to be subjected to a validity check by observing interactions in situ. For, even if there is a disparity between what people say and what they do, these utterances still have a claim to validity. People have to deliver a performance in order to make themselves understood by others. So, it is not a question of lies versus truth, but rather of the difference between “presentation data” and “action data” (Honer 1993, 43; our translation).
Taking an elegant gentle sideswipe at the symbolic interactionists Jerolmack and Khan, Michele Lamont and Ann Swidler (2014) attribute their criticism of the interview method to the fact that the influence of symbolic interactionism has declined as that of cultural sociology has increased. They argue that “methods debates are in fact theory debates” prompted by the paradigm shift within cultural sociology (Lamont and Swidler 2014, 157). After outlining their own “non-individualist approach to the study of how humans collectively engage in meaning-making-processes,” and in a direct response to the assault on the interview method, they advocate a kind of “methodological pluralism,” which comes very close to the understanding of ethnography as a methodologically pluralistic research program (Hitzler 2000). However, whereas Lamont and Swidler (2014, 155) advocate deciding on a particular method on a case-by-case basis, ethnographic cultural analysis designs are characterized by the application of a combination of different methods to one case.
Although participant observation is the centerpiece of ethnography, this does not mean that ethnographic research limits itself to this one method. On the contrary, ethnography is not puristic—neither with regard to data collection procedures nor in relation to data analysis. Rather, it represents an early form of mixed-methods research, an approach that has risen to prominence in recent years (cf. Burzan 2010).
Hence, ethnographers are not united by one specific method but rather by a specific common understanding of scientific practice, which, in their view, should not take place solely in the “laboratory” but “in natural settings” under sometimes arduous conditions. Although the “laboratory” is perceived in science and technology studies as an appropriate location for scientific practice in the natural sciences (cf. Merz 2006), it is an inappropriate metaphor for scientific endeavor in the social sciences, at least. The same goes for the term “natural setting,” which must also be used with caution (Rehberg 2008). Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that ethnography manifests a tendency toward naturalism, which has merely been weakened, but not eradicated, by the establishment of constructivism as a social science paradigm (cf. Knoblauch and Schnettler 2009).
Naturalism has been criticized by the countermovements anti-realism and relativism, which are fueled by numerous contemporary theoretical approaches (cf. Atkinson and Hammersley 2007, 10ff.). Atkinson and Hammersley (2007, 15) criticize naturalism and positivism for neglecting the fundamental reflexivity of social research. Indeed, the reflexive attitude that researchers cannot escape from the social world under investigation and that their findings contribute to its construction is a fundamental element of the ethnographic attitude.
The smallest common denominator of this attitude can be identified as the conviction that (in whatever way) constructed reality cannot be studied in an artificial setting. Therefore, to clarify the question regarding ethnography’s position in the methodological canon of empirical social research: it is neither situated within nonstandardized social research nor between nonstandardized and standardized social research. Rather, irrespective of its provenance, it is located at a maximum distance from the experiment (in support of this, cf. Boellstorff et al. 2012, 47).
Hence, when we were searching for a setting in which to conduct an ethnographic study of “social robotics,” we wanted to find one in which such a technical artifact was actually being deployed under natural conditions as opposed to being tested under laboratory conditions. In contrast to ethnography in Anglo-Saxon countries, which is shaped by symbolic interactionism (cf. Dellwing and Prus 2012), our approach is grounded in phenomenology and therefore calls for an additional analysis strategy, namely, the phenomenological method.
The Ethnographer as a Stranger
A whole string of metaphors point to the fact that ethnography is characterized by a fundamental tension. Anne Honer (1993, 47; our translation) speaks of “professional schizophrenia,” by which she means “hopping between the subuniverses of meaning of everyday life and theory.” In a similar vein, Agar (1980) uses the term “professional stranger” to describe the professional role of the scientist, while Freilich (1970) designates the researcher’s position in the field with the term “marginal native.”
This designation is reminiscent of “marginal man,” the term Robert E. Park used to describe a man “on the margin of two cultures and two societies” ([1928] 1950, 354), who is uprooted from his culture although he has not completely broken with it, and who is “never quite accepted because of racial prejudice in the new society in which he now sought to find a place” (373). Christmann (2007, 92) highlights the inner conflict of this “cultural hybrid,” who can achieve freedom of thought and in his way of living only when he accepts that he is not accepted—in other words, when he accepts the hybrid status imposed upon him (cf. also Stonequist [1937] 1961).
Only in this second sense can one consider the field researcher to be an “experimental marginal man” (Lindner 1990, 203), that is, as a voluntary role player rather than as a bearer of a role imposed on him (cf. Pfadenhauer 1999). In this way, he develops into Simmel’s “stranger,” who does not wish to be accepted into the approached group but rather sees himself as a wanderer between the worlds. He is then “someone who has become a stranger and who, precisely because of his sociocultural alienation, has the chance to see things clearly” (Lindner 1990, 206; our translation).
According to Alfred Schutz ([1942] 1976, 104), the stranger’s “clear-sightedness” stems from the fact that his way of seeing things differs from that of the approached group. In other words, the stranger transcends the boundaries of his “thinking as usual,” which gives rise to a special type of objectivity.
Schutz ([1942] 1976, 104) touches on the stranger’s lack of acceptance in the new society. With explicit reference to Park and Stonequist, he addresses the reproach of “doubtful loyalty” that the stranger faces in the group in which he now lives—a reproach that Schutz considers to be frequently justified. In a consistently phenomenological manner, Schutz begins his analysis of this problem not with the possibly prejudice-laden “other” but rather with the question of how the “cultural pattern of group life” presents itself to the stranger in contrast to the members of the approached group, for whom it is commonsense knowledge. He postulates that the stranger is not rejected in principle but rather that the reproach of doubtful loyalty “originates in the astonishment of the members of the in-group that the stranger does not accept the total of its cultural pattern as the natural and appropriate way of life and as the best of all possible solutions of any problem” (104). Schutz argues that the stranger does not adopt an attitude of rejection in principle, either. On the contrary, he is overwhelmed by the symptomatic incoherence, the lack of clarity, and the inconsistency of the approached group’s commonsense knowledge, which renders orientation and action problematic.
The clear-sightedness that Schutz attributes to the stranger is due neither to a particularly “critical attitude” ([1942] 1976, 104) nor to a crisis-induced process of emancipation—as Park claims in his introduction to Stonequist’s monograph (in Stonequist [1937] 1961, xvii). Rather, his objectivity stems from the need to integrate the unfamiliar elements of the new culture into his “knowledge about” (Vertrautheitswissen). To this end, he carefully questions that which seems self-explanatory to the members of the approached group.
The stranger finds himself confronted with a “cultural pattern of group life” with which he is unfamiliar. Following Parsons, Schutz ([1942] 1976, 92) uses this concept to designate “all the peculiar valuations, institutions, and systems of orientation and guidance.” With explicit reference to Max Scheler’s notion of the “relatively natural conception of the world” (95f.), Schutz adapts the structural-functionalist concept of culture to the sociology of knowledge. For, as he makes clear, the stranger’s problem is not the cultural pattern of the approached group but rather his lack of knowledge of this cultural pattern. As a result, he lacks the scheme of reference to interpret the meanings that these cultural elements have for the group members. These meanings have their origins in the subjective meanings that the authors of these thoughts, actions signs, symbols, etc. assigned to them. However, they are not identical to them. Rather, the subjective meanings have undergone a process of objectivation and institutionalization to become the standardized schemes of interpretation for the group. The stranger lacks not only the schemes of interpretation but also the schemes of expression that he needs to make the meanings of his own actions understandable to others.
The Ethnographer as a Participant
To analyze culture, sociological ethnographers can not only make use of the stranger’s approach to dealing with unfamiliarity elaborated on by Schutz. They can also place themselves for research purposes—that is, artificially—in the typical situation of a “stranger,” who, from a Schutzian perspective, is “indifferent toward the occasion of strangeness” (Göttlich, Sebald, and Weyland 2011, 23; our translation).
However, Schutz refers to the sociologist only as a “disinterested scientific onlooker of the social world,” who, as a scientist, “tries to observe, describe, and classify the social world as clearly as possible in well-ordered terms in accordance with the scientific ideals of coherence, consistency, and analytical consequence” ([1942] 1976, 92). According to Schutz, once he has decided to scientifically investigate the phenomena of a particular social world, the scientific observer “intentionally refrains from participating” in it (loc. cit.).
With this strict separation of (scientific) observation and (social worldly) participation, Schutz highlights the difference between the scientist, who is not burdened with the necessity to act, and the pragmatically integrated “actor within the social world” (loc. cit.). Although he does not express an opinion on linking participation and observation in the form of participant observation—the fundamental ethnographic research method—Schutz’s methodological argument points to the necessity of undertaking a shift in perspective in the course of the research process. Anne Honer highlights this perspectival shifting more than is usually the case in the standard guides to ethnography.
In their standard introduction to ethnography, Atkinson and Hammersley (2007, 82) cite Junker (1960) and Gold (1958), who mapped out the potential roles that the ethnographer can assume in the field on a continuum with the poles “complete observer” and “complete participant,” and with “observer-as-participant” and “participant-as-observer” as points on this continuum. In their discussion of the pros and cons of “complete participation,” the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. However, the authors concede that the approach may open up lines of inquiry “that might not have been available to someone researching overtly” (Atkinson and Hammersley 2007, 82). Their misgivings toward “complete participation” stem, in part, from the fact that they can conceive of it only as covert participation and that they overlook the fact that “complete participation”—or, in our terminology, “observant participation”—is the only way to generate data on immediate experience (Erleben as opposed to Erfahrung).
In their recently published introductory book, Breidenstein et al. (2013, 68; our translation) describe ethnography as being characterized “by a constant shifting between an internal and external perspective, between familiarity and strangeness, and by a gradual interpenetration of these viewpoints.” This notion of perspective-hopping is problematic for two reasons: on the one hand, it is not a question of constantly switching between familiarity and strangeness but rather of the typical experience under conditions of strangeness of the loss of one’s old familiarity and the arduous acquisition of a new one. Schutz’s stranger, the actor within an unfamiliar social world, is always a participant in this world, whereas the social scientist observes it from a distance. On the other hand, it is possible to indicate exactly in which phases of the research process the internal perspective of the participant stranger and the external perspective of the scientific observer are to be adopted.
Anne Honer (1993, 48) suggests that in research practice one should distinguish between the processes of data collection and data analysis. By this she does not mean that the research process should be strictly linear, with data collection being completed before analysis begins. On the contrary, in her view both phases should be circularly linked. However, she draws a clear dividing line between the attitude required in each process. The interpretation of data naturally calls for the attitude of the “disinterested scientific onlooker” (Schutz [1942] 1976, 92). By contrast, according to Honer, access to the internal viewpoint of a culture can be achieved only if one is willing to get existentially involved in its idiosyncrasy and singularity. For the sociological ethnographer, this entails consciously assuming the role of the participant stranger—that is, a participant who experiences strangeness at first hand.
Observation and Participation in Robot-Supported Dementia Care
In her current ethnographic research project on the deployment of social robotics in dementia care, which aims to show the kind of “performance” elicited by this special type of technology (cf. Pfadenhauer and Dukat, 2015), the first author finds herself in the role of a stranger. She began her research with a sociological interest in developments in the field of “social robotics.” Decisive for the selection of the research setting was not the adequacy of dementia care but rather the fact that this robot technology was being deployed in practice—that is, outside the research laboratory or other artificial settings in which most existing studies on social robotics have been conducted. In the meantime, the research team is in direct contact with care workers who look after people who are described in our culture as suffering from the medical condition of dementia. The knowledge that they now share with these care workers is reflected in the fact that they no longer speak of “patients” and “dementia disease” but rather of “people in their respective process of dementia.” Moreover, their growing interest in dementia as a present-day problem confirms that one never emerges from the field as the person one was when one entered it (Honer 1993, 48).
When socio-technical arrangements—a concept derived from the design concept developed by Roger Häussling (2010)—are viewed from a microperspective, the technical artifact is the focus of observation. However, it is not elevated to the status of an acting entity. Rather, it is regarded as being integrated into the meaningful cognitive and physical action of its user. By taking the process of objectivation into account, the artifact is linked back to the actor who designed it. Hence, the object produces a link between the creator and the user, as it were.
Users never hold a neutral, meaning-free artifact in their hands. Rather, it comes to them already encrusted with layers of meaning, which have been attached to it by various stakeholders. In the course of the objectivation process, further layers of meaning are added by manufacturers, marketers, the media, interest groups, social scientists, etc. (cf. Pfadenhauer and Dukat, forthcoming). Nonetheless, users employ the artifact in their own way—sometimes in a way that runs contrary to the intentions of its creators and sometimes exactly as intended. That is the reason why one can say what a robot is, or is going to be, only when one observes the performance of the user.
Two such social robot units are currently in use at the residential care center for the elderly in which we have been conducting an ethnographically designed research project since the spring of 2013. They are deployed exclusively by two so-called “additional care workers,” whose task, according to the Guidelines under section 87b subsection 3 of Book XI of the German Social Code, consists in improving the quality of care and the quality of life of nursing home residents whose ability to cope with activities of daily living is restricted (cf. Pfadenhauer and Dukat, 2015).
In the nursing home under research, the robot is by now firmly established among the numerous activation measures, which range from activation with singing bowls and Snoezelen therapy, through events such as reminiscence breakfasts, church services, theater, and active groups, to playing with specially trained dogs. During the one-year observation period, a rhythm of, on average, three robot applications a month has become apparent. As a rule, the situations in which the robot is deployed are so-called “group activation sessions.” This is in keeping with the aforementioned statutory guidelines (section 2 subsection 3), according to which “group activities [are] a suitable instrument for the prevention of social isolation that is threatened or has already occurred.”
Participant—and for the most part video-supported—observation of this robot-supported (group) activation is our main data collection strategy. In order to be able to recognize the salient characteristics of this form of activation, we applied the principle of minimax contrasting to select for additional observation those measures that we deemed to be structurally similar (e.g., activation with dogs or singing bowls) or clearly different (reminiscence breakfasts, active group). The body of data currently comprises video footage, photos, field notes and observation protocols, recordings of informal conversations and team discussions, and explorative interviews with persons responsible for the activation and care of people with dementia.
Findings Yielded by Participant Observation
One particularly significant insight yielded by our video-supported observations is that, even in a group setting, the deployment of the robot takes the form of individual activation. However, this individual activation may take a variety of forms. Two ideal-typical variants can be contrasted.
In the first variant, the deployment of the technical artifact creates a topic of conversation, and even an “interlocutor.” The characteristic automation of the robot constantly provides both participants with a topic to which they can refer whenever the conversation threatens to wane. However, in the case of persons with dementia, that is precisely what frequently brings the encounter to an end—although they do not wish this to happen. In this variant, the care worker continually presents a conversational stimulus, takes up a broken thread of conversation, encourages the resident to stroke the robot’s fur, comments on its forms of expression, or invites the person to interpret them.
In the second variant, by contrast, the care worker holds back almost completely. Here, her attitude is reminiscent of that of a psychoanalyst who creates an artificial conversational atmosphere by means of a self-imposed reserve that elicits narration on the part of the patient. In this variant, the care worker acts not so much as an interlocutor but as an observer whose gaze switches back and forth between the resident and the robot. In this situation, in which the communicative burden on her is lightened by the presence of the robot, the care worker interprets the way in which the resident interprets the robot and whether the resident makes a connection between her (the resident’s) own actions and the autonomous movements of the device. Here, the deployment of the technical artifact creates an optional spatio-temporal communication setting (Kommunikations-Zeitraum), which the care worker sustains for a relatively long time (cf. Pfadenhauer and Dukat, 2015).
We have thus observed two contrasting variants of the deployment of this robot. In Variant 1, the care worker acts as a participant (in the conversation with the resident). In this variant, humans and technology have what Don Ihde describes as an “alterity relation,” in which technology displays a fascinating “quasi-otherness.” As Ihde notes, “What makes it [technology] fascinating is this property of quasi-automation, the life of its own” (1990, 100).
In Variant 2, the care worker acts as an observer (of the resident’s interaction with the robot) and deploys the robot performatively as “hermeneutic technics” (Ihde 1990, 80ff.). Following Ihde, the technology helps the person to find out something about the world or the other by producing signs that have to be interpreted (cf. also Röhl 2013, 18). The deployment of the robot as “hermeneutic technics” manifests itself not only performatively but also in the fact that from the point of view of (one) of the care workers, what is special about this technology is that the robot—and indeed only the robot—opens, or can be used to open, the “heart doors of memory” (interview, October 2013). According to our interpretatively acquired insight, “heart doors of memory” connotes the shimmering through of the personality—that is, the former “personal identity” (Luckmann 1979)—of the resident in question.
Insights Gained from Participation
Accompanying, and frequently casual, conversations with the care workers who deploy this technology have revealed that they aim to achieve a special impact, and that they believe they succeed in doing so. This impact may, for example, consist in their managing to get otherwise very withdrawn residents to talk and to select their own topics of conversation rather than merely answering questions.
Especially in the case of a technology like social robotics, with its accompanying promise of sociality (cf. Pfadenhauer 2015), the thesis that this technology—and only this technology—has a special impact awakened my interest as an ethnographer. I hypothesized that by supplementing the findings yielded by our observations with insights gained from participation it might be possible to identify the special impact of this technology.
According to psychological research on social robots, the reasons why children locate robotized language computers “between the inanimate and the animate” (Turkle 1984, 41) are (1) autonomous motion, that is movements which are not initiated by the user; (2) automatic voice output, which can be interpreted as the ability to engage in dialogue, and (3) the apparent expression of emotionality reminiscent of facial expressions, gestures, and phonetics. In Turkle’s view, one reason why people develop a “social” relationship with robots is that these artifacts “push certain Darwinian buttons,” for example, by creating by means of camera technology the impression that the robot maintains eye contact (Turkle 2006). In his phenomenology-based study on the entertainment robot AIBO, Scholtz (2008) attributes the experience of his AIBO’s “aliveness” to what Turkle (2011, 86) calls “the hardwiring of evolution,” and classifies this technical artifact as a “sociofact” (Scholtz 2008, 292f.).
By contrast, the impression that I have gained as a participant in my private encounters with the robot seal, and especially with an entertainment (dinosaur) robot marketed as a toy, points in another direction, namely, that I tend to switch back and forth between affinity and distance (Pfadenhauer 2014, 147).
However, I can field my impressions as a plausible alternative to the interpretations of Turkle and others only if I take a phenomenological approach to my immediate, or immediatized, experience with the robots. For phenomenology as a method, the type of data this requires cannot be collected through observation because inner processes cannot be observed from without. Nor can this immediate experience (Erleben) be communicated—at least not without losing substance or gaining sedimented deposits. It cannot even be captured in writing. Hence, it cannot be extracted from interview data or field notes. Therefore, the researcher can immediately experience (erleben) the subject of research only at first hand. To obtain these data on immediate experience, we must conduct observant participation—that is, we must engage personally with the subject of research.
However, as actors within the everyday social world, we almost inevitably project meanings onto the things that we experience—that is, the things we perceive and the things we imagine. Hence, these meanings are not the correlate of the immediate experience itself but are imposed on it “from without,” as it were. To paraphrase Hitzler: We read something into things “as a matter of course,” either by adopting and applying the stocks of knowledge that have been handed down to us in whatever way by others (especially, of course, widely shared assumptions of consensus or certainties of faith—including scientific certainties, in which case they are called “theories”) or by means of idiosyncratic “projections,” especially of the emotional kind.
In view of this, the phenomenological method entails “cleansing” the object of consciousness (Bewusstseinsgegebenheit) of interest to the ethnographer of deposited meanings, which include, in particular, all preconceptions. Hence, in the phenomenological method it is a question of exactly describing an intentional object—that is, an object as it is given to consciousness—be it an immediate, or immediatized, experience, a sensual perception, or a product of the imagination recalled as if it had been experienced. The ethnographer begins by describing its special appearance and then works toward its essential elements and general structures. When doing so, no technical or written recordings are used as material because the empirical foundation of phenomenology is the mental visualization, or immediatization, of the experience.
The ethnographer recognizes the essential, or eidetic, elements of immediate experience by applying the method of eidetic reduction—that is, “bracketing.” In order to achieve an attitude that is devoted exclusively to the immediate experience of interest, she abstains step by step
from all sociological theories and common beliefs about the object of consciousness in question, for example from individual-level theoretical explanations of the attractiveness of artificial companions (ACs),
from all secondhand knowledge—that is from that which she knows, or can know, only because others have told her (e.g., knowledge contained in instructions for use or in other written or verbal form), and
from all subjective attributions of the experience—that is, from positive or negative evaluations, feelings and states of mind, personal needs, and utilitarian considerations (see Pfadenhauer 2008, 342).
The phenomenologist’s disinterested “devotion” to the subject of his or her knowledge interest, which Hitzler (1986) terms “artificial dumbness,” facilitates the “neutral” description of both everyday consciousness and scientific understanding. Denscombe (2003, 102) compares the necessary basic attitude to that of the aforementioned stranger: “A stranger is naive about how things work, and needs to figure them out from first principles before he or she can begin to operate as a competent member of society.”
In contrast to hermeneutic methods, which allow for interpretation in a group setting, the phenomenological method requires one to retreat into seclusion, where, as Moustakas (1994, 87) put it, “I concentrate fully, and in an enduring way on what is appearing before me in and in my consciousness (. . .) everything becomes available for self referral and self-revelation.”
After devoting myself phenomenologically to the experiential data collected by means of participation—here, in the sense of engagement with an entertainment (dinosaur) robot—I arrived at the following insights: The zoomorphic design of the machine, its (limited) auto-mobility and its acoustic signals evoke in me the typification “animal-like.” I take note of the fact that I am very willing to regard the autonomous movements as clumsy and ungainly motor skills and to hear the noise emissions as wailing. In so doing, I am supported by the prior knowledge acquired from reading in the instructions for use that the unit is programmed to go through four development stages from pup to “fully grown” dino(saur), which implies an expanding “action radius” rather than physical growth. Moreover, from the social science literature I am familiar with the thesis that equipping artificial companions with the potential to develop is considered to be beneficial to humans’ relationships with technology. My willingness to interpret the machine as an animal substitute derives to a large extent from the relatively fresh and extremely positively connoted memory of a short period of time with a kitten in my household. This biographical element blends with the hearsay knowledge that I am said to be idiosyncratically permeated by individualization tendencies, which—because of the low level of commitment involved—gives rise to a particular susceptibility to artificial companions. However, this composition of deposits incrementally bracketed by means of eidetic reduction brings to light only one of the essential elements of the AC phenomenon, namely affinity. This affinity is permanently disrupted by the tendency to distance myself. My attitude of affinity comes into conflict, as it were, with a critical attitude that has enabled me to avoid being taken in by the product manufacturer or its marketing and advertising, that is, by a commercially motivated or general attempt to manipulate opinion. Added to this are (1) the curiosity to penetrate what the development potential of the machine means; (2) amateurish attempts to explain the program, for example, as being sequentially structured in such a way that not all components can come into operation from the very beginning but only after a certain running time, respectively; and (3) the search for scientific explanations, for example, for what robots’ ability to learn might mean.
In view of the foregoing, Scholtz’s (2008, 296) thesis that the appeal of such entertainment robots lies in “playing with ambiguity”—that is, in accepting the semblance of animate rather than inanimate material, of contingency rather than causality, etc.—appears quite plausible. However, there is also the fact that this “game” is constantly being interrupted by distancing tendencies. Artificial companions prove to be vehicles to a fantasy world in which we emerge ourselves only playfully—in a pretend mode, as it were. This is not impaired by design- and construction-related imperfections. Rather, they are a welcome occasion to switch from “affinity” to the “other” side.
Conclusion
With recourse to Schutz ([1942] 1976), one can conceive of people in their dealings with advanced technology such as robots as temporary “strangers” in their own culture whose previous orientation schemes are inadequate to interpret this new phenomenon. The effect of robots is intensified by the fascination exerted by things that are new and therefore “astounding” (Goffman [1974] 1986, 28)—things whose functioning we cannot (yet) explain. There is therefore a tendency to “magicify” this technology—that is, to ascribe special powers to it. When we talk of “magicification,” we are not claiming that we, in our capacity as everyday people, actually regard such technical artifacts as interlocutors and interaction partners, but rather that we talk about them, and even sometimes to them, in this way—as can be observed in the case of automobiles, personal computers, satellite navigation systems, etc.
The mystification of everyday people, who find themselves to be temporary strangers in their own culture, is the counterpart of the scientific interpretation efforts of the ethnographer who voluntarily assumes the role of stranger. Phenomenology-based ethnography draws a clearer line between the everyday social world and science than interactionist ethnography does (cf. Dellwing and Prus 2012, 12).
Instead of a hermeneutic interpretation of such mystification phenomena, which we have also found among the care workers in our research setting, we decided to endeavor to get to the bottom of these phenomena by immediately engaging with social robots ourselves, thereby supplementing the data on the performative action of the care workers collected by means of video-supported observation with data on our own immediate experiences. Because the care workers have reported that the technical artifact has a special impact on the residents, we were interested in finding out what form this impact might take. To this end, we focused, as a first step, on the way we ourselves immediately experienced this kind of technology and we endeavored to uncover the essence of this experience using the phenomenological method.
It is particularly important to us to stress at this point that this procedure has not yielded insights into the way in which the nursing home residents or their professional caregivers experience the robot. Rather, we have gained an additional perspective on the field-relevant phenomenon of the impact of this kind of technology—namely, the perspective of a person who immediately experiences this impact and who devotes herself phenomenologically to this experience.
The next step in a life-world-analytical ethnography would be the transition from participant observation to observant participation in the nursing home for the elderly under research (cf. Pfadenhauer 2003). Our chances of doing so are good because, on several occasions in the past when the robot could not be deployed as planned because a care worker was on sick leave, we have found ourselves equipped with the device and sitting among the residents. However, these brief occurrences have taught us that situations such as these are extremely challenging because of the addressee-specific polyvalence of the presentation, which prevented us from concentrating on our own immediate experience. Nonetheless, it does get easier, not only the more familiar with the field we get but also, and in particular, because of the (quasi-)expertise in dementia that we are gradually developing (cf. Pfadenhauer 2009).
Life-world ethnographers such as Anne Honer would certainly not consider it absurd for researchers to train as “additional care workers” in order to be able to carry out activation measures themselves (cf. Pfadenhauer and Dukat, forthcoming). That would be the maximum effort that an ethnographer could possibly make in order to become as similar as possible to the persons under research. However, even then the ethnographer as participant could not see into the minds of others; even then, “the datum of phenomenological description and analysis would be nothing other than its striking immediate experience (i.e. the experience) of the phenomenologist himself” (cf. Hitzler 2012, 356). However, in the best case, the ethnographer’s subjective perspective would be the typical perspective of a qualified care worker engaged in the activation of people in their respective process of dementia.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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