Positioning Care Robots Within Filial Responsibility: Perspectives of Chinese Only Children.

Abstract

The adoption of care robots for older adult care is often framed as a question of whether older adults will accept the technology. This paper argues that, in family-based care for older adults at home, an equally important question is how adult children position care robots within intergenerational care relationships and their responsibility for ageing parents. Using Q methodology with 42 Chinese only children, by-person factor analysis identified four profiles: the Worried Controller, who may prioritise safety over parental autonomy; the Modern Filial, who sees tailored robots as a contemporary expression of filial piety; the Presence Keeper, who resists technologies that substitute for family presence; and the Filial Complementarity Conditionalist, who sees robots as supplementary to filial and emphasises broader policy and service conditions. These profiles show how participants balance filial obligation, caregiving pressure, parental autonomy, family presence, and wider conditions surrounding care-robot use.