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 This website is archived and no longer maintained.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

Family Background and Everyday Lives

Project Summary

In this project we are exploring the role (and the concept) of ‘background’ in the inheritance, creation, and maintenance of family and interpersonal relationships. We are interested in the interplay between where a person comes from, both in a geographic and social sense, and the ways in which they are connected to and differentiated from a variety of others.

Specifically, the project will explore the ways in which differences in background are narrated and negotiated within families as well as the manifestations of background in family rituals and ceremonies and everyday practices and experiences.

View project leaflet, 201 kb [opens in new window]

Research Methods

Up to forty couples - each part of a self-defined family of 'mixed background' - are participating in the project. Participants are recruited through gatekeepers in workplaces, unions and community organisations in Manchester and the North West.

The primary research methods used are :

• Ethnographic interviews and visits
• Visual methods (eg photo elicitation, cultural inventories).

'Ethnographic home tours' will be conducted with a sub-sample of participants. These involve participants showing a researcher around their home, or other significant place and describing significant and mundane family events, rituals and practices. The home tours are videoed and, alongside ethnographic interactions in a range of familiar social settings, allow participants to verbally and physically evoke, reconstruct and represent everyday experiences and demonstrate some of the means by which family relationships are lived and imagined.

We are also commissioning questions in a national omnibus survey. The survey data will be used to gauge popular expressions of 'family background' in a nationally representative sample, so that we can understand how widespread or otherwise are different conceptions and experiences of background and how these are related to conventional socio-demographic variables. We plan to connect this level of understanding with our ethnographic data, to provide a multi-dimensional understanding of the significance of background in everyday lives.

Research Team

Professor Jennifer Mason (Project Leader), Professor Carol Smart (Project Leader), Dr Stewart Muir (Researcher).

Enquiries

For further information about this project please contact Dr Stewart Muir (stewart.muir@manchester.ac.uk).