Abstract
Abstract Originating from anthropology, ethnographic reflexivity refers to ethnographers’ understanding and articulation of their own intervention to participants’ activities as innate study opportunities which affect quality of the ethnographic data. Despite of its methodological discordance with scientific methods which minimize researchers’ effects on the data, validity and effectiveness of reflexive ethnography have newly been claimed in technology studies. Inspired by the shift, I suggest potential ways of incorporating ethnographic reflexivity into studies of human-robot social interaction including ethnographic participant observation, collaborative autoethnography and hybrid autoethnography. I presume such approaches would facilitate roboticists’ access to human conditions where robots’ daily operation occurs. A primary aim here is to fill the field’s current methodological gap between needs for better-examining robots’ social functioning and a lack of insights from ethnography, prominent socio-technical methods. Supplementary goals are to yield a nuanced understanding of ethnography in HRI and to suggest embracement of reflexive ethnographies for future innovations.
Highlights
A social robot refers to a robot that is designated to autonomously carry out specific tasks alongside people and to interact socially with them [1]
Supplementary goals are to yield a nuanced understanding of ethnography in HRI and to suggest embracement of reflexive ethnographies for future innovations
Despite of its common discordant relationships with scientific methods, its relevance and contribution to understanding advanced human-technology social networks have newly been established over the last decade in the technology field as well, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in particular [3, 4]
Summary
A social robot refers to a robot that is designated to autonomously carry out specific tasks alongside people and to interact socially with them [1]. Reflexive ethnography has widely been appreciated as a productive social method in anthropological technology studies for decades. Inspired by the growing appreciation of reflexivity in ethnographic technology studies, this paper concerns potential implications of ethnographic reflexivity for studies of human-robot social interaction if applied. To achieve these goals, I unfold potential ways and implications of incorporating ethnographic reflexivity into the field by suggesting three paths to applying autoethnography, a typical mode of reflexive ethnography, to studies of human-robot social interaction in a productive manner. Since ethnographic theories are scarce in the current HRI field, I refer to trajectories of technological ethnography found in HCI. I present how performance of reflexivity could generate insights into the development of socially-adaptable robots by suggesting three potential ways of its productive application to studies of human-robot social interaction: participant observation, collaborative autoethnography and hybrid autoethnography. I discuss the importance of accepting a particular writing style in publishing such autoethnographic studies in the field
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