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Vital Signs: Paper Session 2c
Wednesday 10 September, 9.30-11am, Room G33
2c. New Ways with surveys and Mixed Methods
‘The commodity chain of the household: From survey design to policy planning’ – Dr Sara Randall (UCL), Dr Tiziana Leone and Dr Ernestina Coast (LSE)
This paper is concerned with researching the social, using different disciplinary approaches (demography and anthropology), in order to better understand real life. The practicalities of data collection, analysis and policy formulation require a social unit to be defined, generally referred to as a household. However, households as defined by survey practitioners may bear little resemblance to the social units that many people live in.
Although household surveys are integral to planning for development in most poor countries, frequently little attention is paid to the issue of how the survey ‘household’ was defined and what this might mean for interpretation.
This research establishes contrasts, contradictions and changes in how households have been defined and used in sub-Saharan African surveys and the implications of these definitions for analyses and policy-making, using two strands of evidence: a review of household surveys (post-1970) and censuses (post-1950) in sub-Saharan Africa, contextualised by comparison with European household surveys; Secondly, in-depth interviews with household survey commissioners, producers and consumers which are analysed using content analysis of verbatim transcriptions. Thirdly, ethnographic ground-truthing of different conceptualizations of the concept of the household among a range of communities in Tanzania.
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‘Talk about talk: A mixed methods approach to exploring emotional support in the UK’ – Julie Brownlie (University of Stirling), Simon Anderson (Scottish Centre for Social Research), Nicky Cleghorn (National Centre for Social Research)
Recent work on mixing methods has made the point that as life is multidimensional, then so, too, must be the methods we need for understanding it (Mason, 2006; Brannen, 2005). To study the complexity of emotional lives, this paper draws on an ongoing ESRC-funded study of people’s beliefs and practices about emotional talk in the UK (The Someone to Talk to Study – www.someonetotalkto.info).
Using a mixed methods approach, the study engages with several key hypotheses about the assumed changing nature of our emotional culture including the argument that there has been a professionalisation of people’s emotional lives and that disclosure – often through talking – has become the norm in the UK (Giddens, 1991,1992; Furedi, 2004; Williams and Bendelow, 1998; Hochschild, 1997). In this paper we draw on our recent experience of devising a module on emotions and talking for the 2007 British Social Attitudes survey and on our follow up qualitative fieldwork with respondents from the survey. In relation to the former, we explore some of the limitations and possibilities of using surveys to understand emotional lives. In part, this can be read as a response to the call for sociology to recognise that the emotional consequences of social change are socially differentiated (Reay 2005). In relation to the qualitative component of the study, we investigate the complexities of how to explore with people the meaning of social change as well as some of the methodological challenges of talking about talk.
‘Young people’s views on what matters in family relationship: Quantitative and qualitative evidence’ – Dr Sarah Irwin (Real Life Methods , University of Leeds)
How do young people perceive their family relationships? How do these relationships influence other aspects of their lives, and their attitudes? These issues are explored through analysis of quantitative and qualitative data generated by the Young Lives study, a project from Real Life Methods. I take as a starting point perceptions of what it takes to do well in life. Sociological research has shown that people often underestimate the importance of class background for future social success, and emphasise the importance of qualifications and hard work. This has led some commentators to argue that people are individualists, seeing themselves as responsible for their own (mis)fortunes. The pattern is paralleled in the Young Lives survey research. However, the young people also saw as very important to doing well in life: family emotional support, and social connections. In short, the fact that people ‘fail’ to see as important the standard sociological indices of social inequality does not mean that they follow individualistic criteria in their judgements about social success. Relationships count, and they are seen to count by many. Additionally, how people perceive this relates to their own familial circumstances and experience. The qualitative evidence shows in more depth how relationships matter to young people in their own lives, how their influence is perceived, and represented, and how such relationships affect other domains of children’s lives. The paper will consider ways in which the different methods generate often differing emphases and insights, it will develop strategies for linking quantitative and qualitative data, and it will explore the scope for enhancing understanding by working with different data sources.
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