Danish law states that if a child exceeds 15 days of absence, they must be offered supplementary schooling or sick-schooling. However, supplementary or compensatory teaching is only made available to very few pupils, with only 3% of eligible children being offered sick-schooling, and 8% of children eligible for supplementary schooling receiving it. At present, the introduction of telepresence avatars is a prevalent solution to raising both school attendance and social inclusion in many schools across the country. Telepresence avatars are defined as technological devices, in some cases robots, controlled by a remote person, with access to visual and audio feedback from the location in which the avatar is positioned. The person in control also has the ability to communicate with and move and/or look around the location. Such technologies are currently used with very limited knowledge on the social effects of the usage.

The target group of the project includes the school-absent child, his or her classmates, parents and their teachers. The study is situated in cultural psychological theory on analogue and digital, social phenomena, and explores how the absentee pupil experiences having an extended digital body, through and with the use of a telepresence avatar, as well as how that extended body is experienced by others.

The main research question is:

How does a telepresence avatar interact with(in) the everyday lives of both absentee children, their classmates and teachers, and with what effects on the social and educational processes of the children involved?

The aim is to investigate how children develop through and with social interactions via a telepresence avatar. The main research question is specified in the following three sub-questions:

1. How do the children experience the interaction with peers and school professionals through an avatar, compared to their analogue experiences of such interactions?
2. How does the interplay between analogue and digital settings influence the self-understanding of the children?
3. How are friendships, relationships and identities established, maintained or dissolved within a digital-analogue social field, mediated by the avatar?

The methodology of the project holds two main aspects:

1. Field work involving participatory observations of digital and analogue practices.
2. Semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews with persons involved in the school-life of the child.

The children will be followed over a period of one year, where intra-actions with and through the telepresence avatar are continuesly explored. Field work will be conducted in schools, hospitals, and home practices once a month for a minimum duration of one hour per observation setting. Observations will be conducted in class rooms from either end of the digital connection, home or hospital respectively school including social processes, that the child is able to participate in through the telepresence avatar such as lunch-breaks, recess and other relevant situations, that arise.

The study will include 43 participants using telepresence systems (or having a linkage to a person using one). Categories such as  gender, sex, sexuality, demographi, cultural herritage or ethnicity will be represented as widely as possible, but representation will likely be limited by the target group, and the predominant selection criteria will be the  presence of any chronic illness. Qualitative interviews will be conducted with absentee children aged 10-19 (n=10). Parents of children (n=20) will be interviewed in pairs. Teachers (n=4) and nurses (n=4) will be interviewed individually, and classmates of the absentee children (n=15; 3x5) will be interviewed in focus groups to counteract any unease a child might feel through solo-interview. Classmates will be selected as key informants on the basis of their relationship with the absent child. Technological means such as which telepresence avatars are represented will be defined by the empirical field.

The empirical analysis will be conducted using the theoretical concepts developed from the aforementioned theoretical frameworks and inspired by prior methodological applications.

Informed consent will be ensured following a clarification of the project's point of departure and what participation entails. Likewise, the consent from parents or legal guardians will be secured. All informants will be pseudonymized in accordance with The Data Protection Agency's rules for ethical reproduction etc., and the Danish Psychological Association's overall ethical guidelines, as well as the General Data Protection Regulation, all of which will be followed.

Possible ethical dilemmas or conflicts arising from working with a potentially vulnerable group of children will be continuously examined; risks will be identified and managed throughout the project. Risk mitigation will include contingency planning for events such as the potential discontinuance of an informant, due to a potential illness worsening. Alternate informants will be included in the initial recruitment, to be contacted and included in such an event.