Scaling up of QLR: Methodological & Ethical Challenges

NCRM Presentation, 30th June, 2008

Karen Henwood, Cardiff School of Social Sciences

Methodological advance : A key aim of Timescapes Network

• To be achieved by the scaling up of qualitative & QLL enquiry through the integration of the projects into a major study combining rich, situated inquiry with extensive temporal and spatial coverage

• Highly reliant on collaborative working, with data pooling & sharing at its heart: collaboration within network also a key methodological strategy, resource & issue

In situ mechanisms for scaling up QLL inquiry

• Timescapes’ common conceptual, fieldwork & methodological questions

• Collection baseline data

• Data sharing and working data archive ultimately for use beyond Timescapes team

• Collaborative working involving secondary analysis across 7 empirical projects

• JISC list to promote QLL methods & build capacity

• Workshops and email forums with researchers, QLL specialists, and policy makers

• NB Membership of UK National Strategy for Longitudinal Studies (Holland & Neale)

Through collectively addressing network’s core conceptual & methodological questions

• What are the practical & ethical requirements for a large-scale qualitative longitudinal study?

• What are the possibilities and challenges for data sharing and archiving in a major qualitative longitudinal study?

• How can mixing qualitative and quantitative methods contribute to the development of qualitative longitudinal research, and enhance its role in longitudinal social science?

• What are the possibilities & challenges of scaling up qualitative & QLL research?

What are the key methodological challenges?

• Questions of study design: methodology/methods for tracking individuals and/or intergenerational groups over time; how many waves of contact? how frequently? ways of addressing problems of attrition?

• How to empirically harness key timescapes concept (multiple vantage points for looking in & across time) for studying dynamic process occurring in & through time?

• Contextualising QLL personal data to make available continuities & changes in historical, social, cultural time

Methodological issues arising

• Logistical: differential timings of core research activities between projects

• Reflexivity as part of process or built into contextualisation of data for archiving?

• Building confidence in segmentation & levels of access to protect sensitive data

QLR Ethics: consensus

• Situated ethics; e.g. consent not a single act but a process involving ongoing negotiation

• Awareness but not hyper-vigilance about such risks; assisted by regular "round table" discussions

• Collaborative development of data pooling, management & archiving; including conditions for sharing & accessing data

• Archiving as part of a live study; different levels of access and control to protect sensitive data & facilitate secondary analysis

Ethical challenges

• Anonymisation; participants’ preferences; balancing with contextualisation; when to begin and what to anonymise?

• Ensuring long-term use of data; foresight about attrition; no retrospective withdrawal of consent once given

• Variability of participant involvement; partnership approach or minimisation to avoid interruption/intrusion

• Ensuring transfer of knowledge between researchers of sensitive information (e.g. still birth/death of child)

• Visual & multimedia; incorporate lessons from QUADS projects

Developments in QLL methodology: (recognised, ongoing)

• Narrative - contemporaneous, retrospective and prospective accounts; sense-making in & through time

• Micro-level temporal processes as the intricate, dynamic flow of meanings that are constitutive of experience : “microtemporalities” through which identities & relationships come to be configured in and through multiplicities of time

• Personal & cultural narratives of life & change; link biography with broader trajectories, focus on questions of generational transfer/transmission, dynamics of socio-cultural change, history in the making

• Psychosocial theory & methods: for overcoming micro-macro, personal-social divides?

PROJECT EXAMPLEMicro-temporalities through the visual

(Cardiff) Men as Fathers study

• Exploring the complexities of temporality and change through photo-elicitation method.

• Using a sequence of visual images representing a cultural narrative; from ‘Victorian’ to ‘modern’ father.

• Getting to the temporal dynamics of paternal identities, masculinities & relationships as they move through historical and socio-cultural time and are contextualised within it.

Data on micro-temporal processesKevin’s extracts as example

IMAGE 1• Kevin: And I wouldn’t like my family photos to be like that.

You know, standing next to each other or whatever, I (2) that’s weird.

IMAGE 2• Kevin: (sigh) Again to me it all seems quite false. Um (2)

you know, you don’t have to say ‘I love you’ all the time and that nonsense, there’s no need to have the public displays of affection. They’re fine if you want them, if they’re naturally on the spur of the moment, but (3) you’ve got to want to do them rather than feel you have to and, you know, that’s more of a formulated plan isn’t it?

Data on micro-temporal processes

‘MODERN’ FATHER IMAGES• Kevin: My take on it now (3) not being a father, and in

some way the earlier photos are far better because there’s structure, there’s (3) more (3) there was more of a niceness about some of it, you know, more gentlemanly. But now there’s no (2) day-to-day. And I’ve only started noticing it more definitely since I found out I’m going to be a father, is how people interact with their children, and I’m finding a lot of it appalling that (2), you know, swearing in front of children and (4) screaming and arguing with their wives.

What about the micro-temporalities?

• Men identifying with, re-configuring and resisting the historical and socio-cultural flow in ‘progressive’ visual representations of paternal identity and masculinity

• Progressive temporality: past outdated, time moving on and evolving

• Circular temporality: Fragments of the past/historical themes as ‘living relics’, the ‘now’ as contrived

• Men as fathers constituting themselves in and against these contradictory and interwoven temporalities

• Men’s engagement with the micro-temporal through the visual cuing us into the bigger QLL picture (their engagements with history, time & change, their meanings & negotiations of time and change)

Concluding remarks

• QLL = sustained intensive investigation of lives in real time as they unfold;- varied ways of putting principles in practice using QLL method

• ‘Men as fathers’ project example:

- sequential narrative in visual mode; a “timescape” for discerning microtemporal process & capturing dynamic complexities of change in the making - self constitution as identification with & reconfiguration of socio-cultural flow- temporalities as progressive and circular- cue to larger policy questions : paternal identities & the long term resourcing of families?

• What does the future hold? ‘Scaling up’ though integration of collective developments network-wide to develop & showcase QLL methods