This article by Catherine Walker, Janet Boddy and Ann Phoenix also appears in the MethodsNews Autumn 2014 issue.
Everyday life has long been an object of social theorising and research. However, it is difficult to theorise the everyday without fixing it as invariant or overinflating it. Methods for researching the complexity of the mundane are, therefore, crucial, particularly since the everyday is not transparently open to scrutiny. Research thus needs to find ways to make the everyday visible and to analyse it.
The NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches) node of NCRM conducts research into a variety of everyday family lives. One NOVELLA project, Family Lives and the Environment uses a multi-method approach to investigate the ways in which families negotiate their family lives in relation to their environments.
The research has been conducted in rural and urban settings across Southern England and Andhra Pradesh, South India, and is a collaboration between NOVELLA researchers at the Institute of Education and University of Sussex, and researchers on the University of Oxford Young Lives (an international longitudinal study of childhood poverty) and Sri Padmavathi Mahila Viswavidyalayam University in India. Catherine Walker, doctoral researcher at NOVELLA, focuses on children's everyday environmental experiences, understandings and practices in India and England, by collecting new data on families with a 12-year old child (the index child) and conducting secondary analysis of Young Lives data.
A challenge in researching the everyday and habitual is that many things people do regularly are taken for granted, given little thought and not readily remembered. One way in which the Family Lives and the Environment project makes mundane engagements with the environment explicit is through a 'mobile' interview with the index child and main caregiver, and sometimes other family members. This consists of a guided walk or drive around familiar places in the immediate vicinity of the family home, planned with the help of a map constructed collectively by the family during a previous research visit. This method enables researchers to experience mundane, taken for granted ways in which participants navigate and negotiate place, as illustrated in the following two case examples.
Embodied meanings
The mobile interview with twelve year old 'Gomathi' and her mother 'Sujatha' took place in a bustling urban district in India, starting with a walk along a busy main road. Catherine's fieldnote recorded:
Through the walk as Sujatha repeatedly pointed out aspects of going out which are potentially dangerous for Gomathi - crossing the road was a particular hazard. [...] As we walked along the road, I could fully sympathise with this I was finding it difficult myself to cross the road, and to dodge the traffic, unstable or dirty areas of road [...]
Practical challenges were also evident in some UK interviews, as illustrated by Catherine's fieldnote of the mobile interview with eleven year old 'Callum' and his family:
I explained that it would be good to stick together as much as possible. As soon as we set out I realised the impracticality of this guidance as we were walking down a narrow pavement between a thorny hedge and a grass bank going up to the main road. [...] Janet and I picked up on what it would be like to walk down the road - the lack of lighting and the noise from the cars and family members added to this - Callum said that he had "like, six thorns" in his shoes from walking down the road to get to the school bus.
In such circumstances, the 'talk' on the 'walk' is inevitably constrained. However, the method generates embodied understandings of the meanings of places for family members that would not be available to researchers through talk alone. Equally, walking and talking helps participants to reflect upon the significance of the places that make up their environments. It is perhaps not surprising that talk of how places are changing, often due to processes outside participants' control, tended to generate such reflections. For example, in an interview immediately following the walk, Callum brought up changes to what children his age can do on the land around his home, reflecting that "...because of everybody closing their land off due to robberies and the roads getting faster and faster, due to better and better cars, kids can't go out and about as much."
This was a topic that he returned to throughout the research activities, also relating this to the growing influence of technology on children's time use and activities. However, the mobile interview vividly indicated that these issues are embodied and served to focus Callum's narratives and those of his mother on the meanings their family environments held for them.
Occasionally the 'walking interview' took place in a car, either because that better captured the family's everyday practices, or because heat or darkness prohibited a walk. When sampling within specific geographical areas, walking interviews with different families sometimes literally crossed the same ground, but highlighted the different significance that space and place can have.
The urban 'walk and talk' interviews often took place in noisy street environments. This frequently made it challenging to transcribe the audio recordings. However, the noisy recordings are highly evocative and open up families' everyday environments, practices and narratives to research understandings in ways that would be difficult to access otherwise.
For further information about NOVELLA, please see their website.