Vital Signs: Paper Session 3c
Wednesday 10 September, 11.30-1pm, Room G33
3c. Personal/home lives
‘Researching family relationships: A mixed-methods approach – Dr Jacqui Gabb (Open University)
In this paper I will demonstrate how the integration of different qualitative methods produces a dynamic account of everyday intimacy in families. Mixing methods generates multilayered, richly textured material on where, when and how intimacy is experienced and why intimate interactions take on particular forms, values and understandings. This paper draws on findings from my ESRC-funded methodological project¬ – Behind Closed Doors: Researching Intimacy and Sexuality in Families (RES 000 220854). In this study I used different methods to collect data on the sensual, emotional and embodied interactions between parents, parents and children, and siblings. I will illustrate how different methods produced data on different aspects of family relationships. For example participant diaries illustrated patterns and routines of interaction, household 'emotion maps' charted the spatial dimension of family relationships, biographical narrative interviews accessed stories across life course framed through participants' own emotional framework, vignettes and images generated discussion around normative values. The richness of data from these methods, especially innovative methods such as 'emotion maps', illustrates the benefits of creativity in research design. Combined, these mixed-methods produced comprehensive data on family's everyday sense making practices of intimacy. How families define and negotiate the boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate conduct and the processes through which social policy, cultural discourses and public debates on sexuality in families emotionally and practically affect intimate experience and relational ties.
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‘Learning from young children: Enabling 3 and 4 year olds as commentators on their own experiences’ – Dr Christine Stephen, Joanna McPake, Professor Lydia Plowman (Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling), Sarah Berch-Heyman (Formerly of Stirling Institute of Education)
This paper describes our attempts to understand preschool children’s experiences with information and communication technologies (ICT) at home. Our focus is two-fold (i) to give an account of what we can learn from engaging directly with 3- and 4-year olds that might otherwise have been overlooked and (ii) to describe and evaluate the methods we adopted in our attempts to ensure that we maximised the children’s contributions to the research.
We are drawing on data from Entering e-Society, a longitudinal ESRC-funded investigation of children growing up with digital technology in 24 case study families. We set out to explore the characteristics of the children’s developing e-literacy and the ways in which this was shaped by growing up in particular families. Our theoretical understanding of development draws on the Vygotskian socio-cultural tradition which sees learning and development as mediated through interactions with others who are more knowledgeable or experienced. However, our construction of children is as active agents who both reproduce and change their social and cultural environments. It was, therefore, important for us to go beyond interviews with parents and find ways of interacting with young children that allowed them to articulate their perspectives in ways that were comfortable and empowering.
By paying attention to the children’s perspectives we have learned that they are discriminating users of ICT who evaluate their own performances, know what gives them pleasure and who differentiate between operational competence and the substantive activities made possible by ICT.
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‘Gamblers and their significant others: Interplays of commentary in understanding real lives’ – Dr Kahryn Hughes, Gill Valentine and Charlotte Kenten (University of Leeds)
In repeat life history interviews with self-identified ‘problem’ internet gamblers and one-off in-depth interviews with their significant others, in a study funded under a joint ESRC and Responsibility in Gambling Trust (RIGT) initiative, we observed there was no core narrative of problem internet gambling across our participant sample. Instead, when and why internet gambling becomes a problem, in participants’ accounts, is as porous as when and why it ceases to be a problem. However, despite this diversity, analyses of interview transcripts suggested that understanding different aspects of time is key to understanding processes of meaning formation around problem gambling, how this meaning formation is achieved both by the gambler independently within his/her understandings of the constraints and possibilities characterising their particular ‘real lives’ context; and achieved through ongoing negotiation and definition between the gambler and those we have chosen to characterise as their significant others. This presentation will consider how, by viewing participants’ narratives through the lens of ‘time’ and viewing ‘time’ in the narratives, in a study using a qualitative longitudinal design, we are able to explore ideas of ‘real lives’ within intimate relations. In particular, how different temporalities shape and maintain particular living and identity practices, which moves us from trying to explain ‘states’ in gamblers’ identities (e.g, ‘problem’, ‘non-problem’) to observing how identities and intimate relationships migrate and are re/worked over time.
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