Doing Family in Three - Two Partners and an Animal Companion

In the presentation, I will refer to the research results obtained during the 2023/2024 study. This was an interdisciplinary (sociology & psychology) study of couples accompanied by their dogs, during which the whole ‘families’ took part in the measurements.

The main goal of the project was to identify the types of relationship between a young childless human couple and their dog. The study was carried out mainly as a sociological and psychological project dedicated to measuring interspecies relationships.

Its cognitive tasks was to realise the postulate of studying social reality with including a non-human perspective (sociology with animals). An important aim of the project was to introduce dogs in the research process in order to obtain direct data from them. The realisation of this task required the integration of methods from the field of natural sciences into the social sciences. The team of researchers decided to use measurement of cortisol levels in humans and dogs and ethological observation of the dogs' behaviour during the study.Nineteen couples between the ages of 21 and 46 took part. All couples did not have children. Sociological, in which we investigated with the combined interview method how couples talk about their relationship with their dog. The interview instrument was divided into three main episodes, which were opened with a measurement of cortisol in all study participants. The observation of the dog's behaviour and the couple's behaviour towards the dog in this part was also reflexive and provoked the definition of the role and type of interspecies bond by human and non-human participants. Qualitative sociological interview and ethological observation of the dog's behaviour were the main axis of the research procedure.