Real Life Methods ran from October 2005 to January 2009. This website is archived and no longer maintained. For up to date information, please see www.manchester.ac.uk/realities
Vital Signs: Paper Session 4c
Wednesday 10 September, 3.30-5pm, Room G33
4c. Experiential, psychosocial and metaphorical approaches
‘Reflections on the Experience Sampling Method (ESM): Exploring everyday well-being in both verbal and visual mediums’ – Anne Kellock, Rebecca Lawthom, Karen Duggan, Professor Judith Sixsmith, Jenny Hawkins, David Brown, John Haworth, Carolyn Kagan, Ilana Mountain, Assiya Siddiquee, Clare Worley, John Griffiths and Christina Purcell (MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University)
The difficulties of investigating personal and social well-being have been documented within recent research (Haworth, 2007). In particular, interviews about well-being tend to emphasise cognitions in ways which more often provide past rationalisations of feelings of well-being. Bringing together people’s words with visual stimuli helps to locate thoughts, feelings and emotions within a directly experienced present context.
In the current participatory project, a mixed verbal and visual methodology was adopted in which 12 participants (members of staff and students in a university department) documented a week of their lives using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) (Haworth, 2007) to explore their own well-being. During this time participants responded to an alarm on a mobile phone, pre-set to beep eight times randomly each day. On the alarm, participants took a photograph of their main activity and responded to a series of short questions regarding well-being by voice recording onto the mobile phone. These questions concerned level of interest, enjoyment, challenge and allowed a free description of the way the person was currently feeling.
The paper will focus on the participatory approach of the project as well as examining the mixed-method used. The participatory and experiential nature of the project will be explored using feedback and reflections from the participants. These provided insight into the mixed-method approach, everyday intrusiveness and privacy maintenance, social engineering of activity and a range of feelings about the experience as a whole as well as some pertinent comments for the possible future directions of this project.
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‘Using psychoanalytical concepts to understand a father-son relationship: the importance of biography’ – Dr Brendan Gough (Real Life Methods, Nottingham Trent University)
Recent qualitative research in social psychology has been dominated by discourse analysis, but this turn to language has been critiqued in some quarters for glossing over subjectivity. To address this shortcoming, some researchers have turned to psychoanalytic concepts in order to provide enriched psychosocial understandings of subjectivity. The present paper builds on this work by applying psychoanalytic theory to a case study of a father-son relationship, with a particular focus on the son’s talk about his father and himself. Through using psychoanalytic as well as discursive concepts, I argue that the son’s account of his relationship with his father is shaped by discursive as well as unconscious operations. Specifically, the sustained refusal to critique his father for his perceived failings is read as a form of reparation which contains (repressed) feelings of hostility towards the father borne from early experience. As the son oscillates between paternal critique and endorsement, it is also contended that the son’s identity shifts between traditional masculinity (embodied by the father) and more modern, sensitive masculinity. The importance of biographical fragments for understanding ‘real-life’ relationships and identities is then discussed.
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‘Metaphor analysis and real life data’ – Professor Lynne Cameron (Real Life Methods, Open University)
Metaphor is not only a rhetorical device but works cognitively to structure concepts. For example, families are talked about as containers (in the family) and as locations (on your side of the family). In the method of metaphor analysis adopted here, metaphors in talk become data for investigation of thinking and affect. Metaphor analysis was applied to interview data collected for the Family Resemblances project. Participants were a married couple in their 30s, white British. The analysis addresses two research questions: (i) What metaphors are used to talk about families, family histories, and family traits? (ii) How do metaphors contribute to the dialogic constructions of self by participants in the interview? Metaphors in the transcribed talk were identified and coded using Atlas ti software. The 680 metaphors were coded into 51 semantic groups, e.g. ‘container’ and ‘movement’, and coded for topic, e.g. ‘family’ or ‘job’. Systematic patterns of metaphorical meaning and affect around specific topics were extracted. Two dominant metaphors were used to talk about family traits: VALUABLE OBJECTS THAT ONE GENERATION GIVE TO ANOTHER and PASSED THROUGH CONTACT. In addition to metaphors of FAMILY AS CONTAINER and AS LOCATION, preferred feelings between family members were spoken of using metaphors of WARMTH. Metaphors of MOVEMENT OUTWARDS were important in dialogically constructing the woman as ‘adventurous spirit’. The man constructs himself as ‘problem solver’, while another side of his personality – ‘worrier’ -- is jointly constructed, using the metaphor of illness as an entity that appears from nowhere.
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