Qualitative Research current issue

Editorial -- Special issue: qualitative research and methodological innovation

Taylor, C., Coffey, A. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

A psycho-discursive approach to analysing qualitative interview data, with reference to a father--son relationship

Gough, B. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

I want to make a case, following some recent social psychological thinking (Georgaca; Frosh et al.; Hollway and Jefferson), for using psychoanalytic concepts to inform qualitative interviewing and (particularly) the analysis of interview data. More specifically, I wish to advocate the use of both discursive and psychoanalytic perspectives in facilitating qualitative data analysis: the deployment of psychoanalytic concepts directs us to interviewee biographies and subjectivity, complementing the discursive emphasis on the language use and function during interviews. To illustrate the benefits of this ‘psychodiscursive’ approach, I draw upon interview data on a father-son relationship, derived from a wider ESRC-sponsored Node project on family resemblances, to trace defensive as well as discursive patterns in the interview data. I will be arguing that both discursive and psychoanalytic frameworks can offer valuable, and not necessarily incompatible, levels of interpretation, while either perspective presented in isolation will lead to an impoverished analysis.

Beyond the standard interview: the use of graphic elicitation and arts-based methods

Bagnoli, A. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

This article reviews three visual methods based on drawing that I applied in my research on young people: the arts-based projective technique, the self-portrait, and the graphic elicitation methods of the relational map and the timeline. Examples of these methods are drawn from their application in two studies, the Narratives of Identity and Migration project, exploring young people and identities in England and Italy, and the Young Lives and Times. The article argues that applying these drawing methods in the context of an interview can open up participants’ interpretations of questions, and allow a creative way of interviewing that is responsive to participants’ own meanings and associations. The article discusses the analytical potential of graphic elicitation and arts-based methods, by making reference to the insights that they offered in the contextual analysis with more traditional text-based data. The efficacy of these methods is critically discussed, together with their limitations, and their potential within the context of qualitative longitudinal research.

Footwork: moving and knowing in local space(s)

Hall, T. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

This article is concerned with movement and terrain and with the ways in which qualitative inquiry might engage with and combine these in local studies of people and places. Movement is at a premium today — no shortage of social and cultural commentators insist on it — and bids fair to provide the social sciences with a new conceptual paradigm. Mobile actors abound and what were once spaces of place are now reckoned spaces of flows; space itself, emancipated from territory, becomes mobile and is deployed as a capacity. Qualitative research, having always allowed its actors to deploy a richer and more fluid world, is well placed to respond — but for one significant snag. The article sets the question: What happens to the qualitative commitment to the local, to grounded research and fieldwork, now that processes of mobility are said to transcend setting and location? Rather than look to ways in which to extend the reach of the qualitative researcher — across space, between places — the article considers how qualitative research, while remaining local, might nonetheless be brought together with movement. Two first-hand empirical examples of local qualitative inquiries directed to movement (as object and method) are used to develop this line of argument. A focus on pedestrian movement in particular aligns the article with widening inter-disciplinary and methodological interest in walking practices.

Coming to our senses? A critical approach to sensory methodology

Mason, J., Davies, K. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

In light of the recent upsurge in the popularity of sensory, and particularly visual, methods, this article makes a case for a sensory methodology that remains attuned to the complex ways in which the senses are tangled with other forms of experience or ways of knowing. Drawing on a project investigating the social significance of family resemblances, we look at how our methods (a combination of visual methods and creative interviewing) emphasized the interplay between tangible and intangible sensory experience, including elements of the sensory that were visible, audible, touchable, etc., in the present as well as those which people conjured in their sensory imaginations and ethereal or mystical ways of resembling. We suggest that ‘sensory intangibility’ is vital to how we see resemblances and to the practice of sensory methodology.

Moving stories: using mobile methods to explore the everyday lives of young people in public care

Ross, N. J., Renold, E., Holland, S., Hillman, A. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

In this article we explore the ways in which mobile research methods can be utilised to create enabling research environments, encounters and exchanges, generating time and space for participants and researchers to co-generate and communicate meaningful understandings of everyday lives. The article focuses on the use of two mobile methods, ‘guided’ walks and car journey interactions, and the productiveness of these methods in contributing to the substantive and methodological aims of the (Extra)ordinary Lives project, an ethnographic and participatory research study that explored the everyday lives and relationship cultures of a group of young people in public care. Through this account we discuss the possibilities that mobile research encounters offer for the exploration of sensitive topics, as contexts through which intimacies can be interwoven within narratives of the mundane ordinariness of the everyday.

Qualitative research and deliberative methods: promise or peril?

Evans, R., Kotchetkova, I. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

This article explores the relationship between qualitative research and public engagement with science and technology by critically evaluating a deliberative exercise incorporating several aspects of contemporary science studies. The project used in-depth interviews, reconvened focus groups and a roundtable workshop to simulate ‘upstream’ public engagement by investigating how patients, carers and lay citizens evaluated different treatment options for Type One diabetes. By comparing how these treatments were discussed in focus groups and a roundtable workshop we show how the choice of research method makes a significant difference not just to the data collected but also to the role of the researcher in analysing those data. In particular, we note how deliberative methods erase the traditional role of the qualitative researcher as an analyst who synthesizes and interprets data, leaving them as little more than a facilitator who enables citizens to synthesize and interpret experience in their own terms. In reflecting on this outcome we suggest that an unintended consequence of citizen empowerment might be the disempowerment of the academy.

Chasing shadows: defining network boundaries in qualitative social network analysis

Heath, S., Fuller, A., Johnston, B. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:34 PST

Defining network boundaries is a key challenge in social network analysis. In our recent qualitative study of network influences on educational decision-making — based on interviews with 107 individuals from 16 case study networks — the set of members with whom interviews were secured in each case represented only a sub-set of the broader networks from which they were drawn. Following an introduction to our study and an outline of our approach, we consider some of the processes of filtering and selection that affected the specific composition of our network sample, and reflect upon what this tells us about the processes by which participants in network-based research make decisions about the representation of their networks within research contexts. We then explore the question of whether the partiality of our data actually matters, and conclude that it reflects the permeable, partial and dynamic nature of social networks, characteristics which are central to qualitatively-informed understandings of SNA.