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experienced!” Other topics were examined according to the interview
guidelines, e.g. former feelings and experiences with technical devices.
We noticed that the initial narration of the subjects comprised
a lot of ascriptions towards the system, so during the fi rst step we
concentrated on those parts of the interview within our analysis.
During the second step, we focused the interview sequence on the
experience of the affect-oriented intervention using 'Interpersonal
Process Recall' (IPR). IPR is a special interview situation, which is
established in psychotherapy research (Elliott, 1986; Frommer and
Lange, 2010). It facilitates the identifi cation of the subtle, hidden aspects
of an interaction, and stimulates more accurate reports of experiences:
The record of the interaction is promptly shown to the subject and he/
she should think back through the situation and describe what he/she
felt and experienced. The analysis of the initial narrative interview
sequence, as well as the sequence referring to the intervention, was
done using established qualitative social research methods, specifi cally
systematic content analysis and interpretative phenomenological
analysis, which allow for the condensing of the material, and extraction
of the main topics (Krippendorff, 2004; Smith and Osborn, 2003).
In the following paragraphs, we concentrate on some of the
main results from our interview analysis: first, regarding uncertainty
when ascribing towards the system during the whole interaction,
and second, regarding their experiences when ascribing during the
system's intervention.
The first part of the analysis revealed that the users were
relatively uncertain about what they can expect from the system,
what characteristics, aims, motives, and so on, they should ascribe
towards it and how they should optimally communicate with it. This
uncertainty can be recognized on three levels: first, actualization of
presumptions, ascriptions and memories; second, the behavior and
actions of the counterpart; third, the strategies when in contact with
the counterpart/reactions of the user. In the following, there are
examples for each of these uncertainty levels introduced and illustrated
by subjects' utterances in the interviews.
Actualization of presumptions, ascriptions and memories
Users experience “uncertainty of expectation caused by the phenomena
of hybridization”. That is, the system is experienced as a kind of
hybrid, which is neither a clear technical interaction partner (like
a computer or machine), nor a clear human interaction partner
(“after all you felt like you were talking to a human, but when you
still remember that it's a computer voice it makes you afraid that it
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