Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement of Machine Companionship: A Scoping Review
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent definitions and measurements of machine companionship for researchers and practitioners in AI and human-computer interaction, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature rather than proposing new methods.
This scoping review tackled the lack of formal conceptualization and measurement of machine companionship (MC) by systematically analyzing 71 scholarly works from 2017-2025, resulting in a literature-guided definition of MC as an autotelic, coordinated connection between human and machine that is subjectively positive and unfolds over time.
The notion of machine companions has long been embedded in social-technological imaginaries. Recent advances in AI have moved those media musings into believable sociality manifested in interfaces, robotic bodies, and devices. Those machines are often referred to colloquially as "companions" yet there is little careful engagement of machine companionship (MC) as a formal concept or measured variable. This PRISMA-guided scoping review systematically samples, surveys, and synthesizes current scholarly works on MC (N = 71; 2017-2025), to that end. Works varied widely in considerations of MC according to guiding theories, dimensions of a-priori specified properties (subjectively positive, sustained over time, co-active, autotelic), and in measured concepts (with more than 50 distinct measured variables). WE ultimately offer a literature-guided definition of MC as an autotelic, coordinated connection between human and machine that unfolds over time and is subjectively positive.