Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life

Working with Everyday Life Materials

Svend Brinkmann, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857024763, 9780857024756
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Investigación y metodología de las ciencias sociales

This book is a ?survival guide? for students and researchers who would like to conduct a qualitative study with limited resources. Brinkmann shows how everyday life materials such as books, television, the internet, the media and everyday conversations and interactions can help us to understand larger social issues.

As living human beings in cultural worlds, we are constantly surrounded by ?data? that call for analysis, and as we cope with the different situations and episodes of our lives, we are engaged in understanding and interpreting the world as a form of qualitative inquiry. The book helps its reader develop a disciplined and analytic awareness informed by theory, and shows how less can be more in qualitative research. Each chapter introduces theoretical tools to think with, and demonstrates how they can be put to use in working concretely with everyday life materials.

PART I

ONE

Qualitative research and everyday life

Not long ago, my oldest child, a boy, started school. The school is located very close to where we live, and the sunny morning I walked him there, both of us were quite excited. We talked about the classmates he was soon going to meet. Some of them he knew in advance from the Kindergarten he had attended, but most of them would be new to him. Almost all his friends – at least the ones that had been invited to play in our house in the past – were boys, and my wife and I hoped that he would have a chance to expand his circle of friends to include some girls. We find it important to try to avoid the common segregation of children into groups of boys and girls, and, in our own childhood from the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, both of us had had as our best friend a child of the opposite sex.

Our ideals were quickly challenged, however, for already at the first school meeting, when all the parents had a chance to meet each other and exchange contact information, two lists circulated among the parents on which they were supposed to write down their telephone numbers. One list for the parents of boys and another for the parents of girls. It was tacitly assumed that boys would only play with other boys and girls with other girls. Not just this list, but also much of the micro architecture of the school worked for, rather than against, a segregation of the two sexes. In the rooms where the children play after school until they are picked up by their parents, there is one section where boys can put their clothes and another one for the girls. ‘The boys rummage much more than the girls’, as one of the pedagogues explained, ‘and we don’t want the boys to bother the girls’. Even the refrigerators contain separate shelves for boys and girls to put their lunch boxes. Obviously, when attending after school activities such as sports, the children are also divided according to gender, although there are no physical differences at this young age that warrant it.

As a result, my son plays almost exclusively with other boys. Although his interests are not just stereotypically boyish (soccer, violent video games), but also more gender neutral (he loves things like theatre, nature and music), he becomes quite embarrassed when we suggest that we invite one of the girls home to play with him. There are clearly numerous social factors that support a segregation of boys and girls and position them in stereotypical ways at this quite early age, even if the official school policy is meant to counter such tendencies. When he has occasionally (very rarely) played with a girl after school, it is important for him that this is kept as a secret from his class mates. Otherwise, there is a risk of teasing or even bullying.

These few remarks are meant to illustrate what I mean in this book when I address qualitative inquiry in everyday life. We have an everyday life occurrence – a child beginning school life – and we have a situation that causes the researcher (in this case myself) to stop and wonder. Something seems strange, confusing and maybe even worrying. An ideology of gender equality and positive relationships is seemingly contradicted by the social practices of school life. The short description given above draws upon two main sources:

• The researcher’s experience of something strange, but interesting, from his everyday life. This would not be strange and interesting to everyone, but it was to me, given my personal background and childhood experiences, and also my theoretical readings of some feminist literature that have sensitised me to certain phenomena rather than others. The biographical and theoretical here meets the concrete social reality, and this is where qualitative inquiry often happens.
• I use my own memory of the encounter with the school. I remember a specific conversation with a professional pedagogue there, and I refer to observations of the school architecture and a few episodes of after school activities. There are thus both symbolic and material factors present that inform this micro analysis, based on my own experience.

This situation from everyday life could form the beginning of what I mean by a qualitative research project into everyday life. In order for me to turn this into a more focused study, I would have to supplement the initial observations and recollections with further ones. I would have to consider the ethical implications of writing about people I know and who know me. I would have to read about research that has already been done on the topic and think about how this could inform the way I see the situation now. I would have to consult theories about sex, gender and school life. And I would have to reflect upon my own role in the process of inquiry: Why have I not confronted the school with my observations and criticisms? Why is it so important to me that children have friends of the opposite sex?

If I were to do these things, and write about them in the process, I would likely end up with a piece of everyday life research that could perhaps even be published and be of interest to others. Hopefully, I would become able to comprehend the situation better. I could possibly even use my analysis to try to change the situation if I still felt a need to do so. Or perhaps I would be forced to conclude that there are legitimate reasons why the local social world operates like this that will have to be respected. These questions are not rhetorical, for I honestly do not know the answers, but that is exactly the point, since I have not yet done the study – I have only taken the most preliminary steps towards an understanding of the phenomenon as laid out above.

Steps in the research process

An outline of the steps that are needed to carry out an everyday life research project (such as the one just described) would give us something like this:

1. Choose a topic. Normally this will be based on something that genuinely interests you, bothers you or confuses you. It is preferably based on something you do not yet understand and which you would like to understand, perhaps in order to be able to act more appropriately towards it. The first step can often be conceptualised as a breakdown in understanding. Good social science frequently springs from a breakdown (‘I don’t understand this’), coupled with a mystery (e.g. the framing of the breakdown as a riddle) and then a possible resolution of the riddle, e.g. based on a novel perspective on the matter that confused you (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011). If you are in the process of learning how to do research, you may be ‘forced’ by the teacher or the curriculum to choose a topic that might not constitute a breakdown. In this case, you can favourably practise breaking down your own understanding of the phenomenon you are going to study. Later in this chapter (and also in the next one), I present some techniques that can help you to defamiliarise yourself with the phenomena that you take for granted, thus creating a sense of curiosity that is conducive to good qualitative research.
2. Collect materials. When you choose a topic, you are simultaneously collecting materials. These steps are deeply related – as are all of them. Recollections that you write down, newspaper articles that you read, commercials that annoy you or conversations that seem to stick in your memory can all be examples of materials that may enter into defining the topic that interests you. From the point of view of the present book, ‘data collection’ is not a separate process that starts only after the research project is designed, but something we all constantly do as living human beings with memories.
3. Consult the literature. We should never underestimate the insights that other researchers have provided us with, so it is important to read about empirical analyses in the topical area, and it is also important to develop one’s imagination and powers of observation by reading theoretical literature. Who knows, maybe Hegel’s dialectics of recognition can inform my understanding of the issue of gender segregation? Or maybe I need Judith Butler or Erving Goffman?
4. Continue collecting materials. Try to think broadly about what may be needed and include visual as well as textual materials whenever possible. Don’t try to purify data (e.g. by conducting only standardised research interviews), but use everything that helps you clarify the situation. Have you read novels about your phenomenon? Or media stories or television programmes? Where and how is your phenomenon represented in the social world? As Bruno Latour (2005) argues in a recent book on Reassembling the Social, from now on, when you think of what you are doing as a research project, everything is data! That everything is data in everyday life research is both a burden and a blessing. It is a blessing since it makes it easy to get started on an often enjoyable research quest, but it is also a burden since the researcher risks losing focus. The researcher must therefore frame the research project very carefully in order not to end up with a deeply fragmented analysis. My argument is that theory is the most important tool to help in this regard, which means that you must constantly go back to step number three.
5. Do analytic writing. I have already quoted Laurel Richardson that writing is a method of inquiry. I call the writing that you need to do ‘analytic’ to stress the idea that good qualitative writing often uses theoretical concepts to analytically unpack the social situations, events and processes that are scrutinised. I am not saying that you should avoid using the concepts of everyday language to write about everyday life – indeed you often must use the vernacular – but I am saying that the concepts of everyday language are theoretically loaded in the first place, and you can do a much better analysis if you understand both how they are so loaded, and can evaluate whether this works for or against what you want to say (e.g. my way of talking about boys and girls above used everyday language, but in a way that possibly reinforces some of the distinctions that I would like to deconstruct).
6. Publish your text. Your writing is done when things have cleared up for you, when the breakdown in understanding is somehow mended, and you are able to explain to others how you now understand things (differently) and possibly even to convince them that your understanding is helpful. Sometimes you must adjust your text to fit certain standard ways of reporting if you aim to publish it. Sometimes you may even have to downplay the fact that you have done a piece of everyday life research and reconstruct the steps that you have taken to make them fit into more standardised formats. You should never lie, of course, but some disciplines and journals will not be open to what I recommend in this book. You can sometimes work your way around this by writing that the empirical examples of your analysis ‘illustrate’ some general point instead of saying that your materials made you discover something new in the social world. Other journals – often those that use the word ‘qualitative’ in their names – are completely open to the kind of research that this book is about.

Some will no doubt find these six steps overly loose and unmethodical. But my point is that good research very often rests on a cultivation of common human capabilities of understanding and communicating with others rather than on mechanical methodological procedures. This is not a licence to do sloppy work – quite the contrary. It demands a lot from the researcher: she must learn to focus her attention, spend hours reading and writing and be a master of linking theoretical concepts with the empirical world. One can only learn to do this by trying it again and again and by reading examples of research that have employed this procedure. This explains why I have devoted a considerable number of pages in this book to examples of concrete everyday life analyses. It is not enough to say what one should do – it needs to be shown.

If this way of working appeals to you, I encourage you to try it out for yourself. One way would be to just do it – following the loosely outlined steps above – and then return to the rest of this book afterwards as a kind of after-thought that may enhance the quality of the analysis. Another way would be to read the book first and experiment with some of the practical exercises along the way. In any case, I believe that it is very important to work concretely with some everyday life materials while reading this book. In the final sections of this chapter, I will present three examples of everyday life research that may serve as sources of inspiration.

On everyday life

It seems reasonable to begin a book entitled Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life by explaining its main concepts: qualitative inquiry and everyday life. In the rest of this chapter, I will first briefly address the notion of everyday life before moving on to qualitative inquiry, both of which are harder to define than one would think. I recommend approaching qualitative inquiry as a vital human activity that all living human beings are engaged in. In the next chapter, I draw upon varieties of pragmatic and hermeneutic paradigms (that emphasise the idea that being alive as a human being should be conceived as an interpretative process of inquiry) to develop a philosophical anthropology of the human knower.

The term ‘everyday life’ has entered many corners of the social sciences today. Classical works have investigated ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ (Goffman, 1959), ‘everyday life in the modern world’ (Lefebvre, 1968) and ‘the practice of everyday life’ (de Certeau, 1984). More specific approaches, such as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), have also advocated a focus on the mundane details of human interaction as the key to understanding social processes. A focus on our everyday lives becomes particularly central in a postmodern era, when society ‘has been broken apart and reconstituted as everyday life’ (Ferguson, 2009, p. 160). In a postmodern world in fragments, where larger social structures and processes are experienced as disjointed, everyday life has become the essential ‘theatre of fragmentation’ that must be studied if we want to understand our lives (p. 157).

Social science began with the emergence of modern, industrial society, when individuals and society were conceived as separate entities, and when this separation was seen as problematic, resulting in disintegration, anomie and the modern malaises (such as excessive individualism, loneliness and neuroses). More specifically, we can say that the particular social science focus on everyday life began at the University of Chicago in the late nineteenth century, when there was a need to understand the experiences of people living in the new big cities (Jacobsen, 2009). The urban experience has since intensified in the postmodern epoch, which, among other things, is characterised by the fact that Society (conceived as a stable, hierarchical social order) seems to be breaking apart and is reconfigured as heterogeneous networks and practices that have a more precarious and fluid character. Some refer to these emerging social forms as network sociality (Wittel, 2001) and others argue that they result in deeply fragmented forms of human experience that demand a fragmented rendition in writing (Baudrillard, 2007).

In any event, what seems to be the case is that ‘the social’ in broad terms is recast as everyday life in the social sciences. The social is no longer primarily conceived as a hierarchical and rigidly structured sphere (like the Marxian base-superstructure or the Habermasian system-lifeworld), but as something that is much more mundane, fluid and heterogeneous. This does not mean that inequalities have disappeared and that everyone shares the same perspective on culture and society – far from it – but it does mean that it has become more difficult for people to know their own society, for the social no longer has an obvious centre. Our ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004) no longer revolves around one central deity, state or nation. Rather, the flow and flux of our everyday lives is what now constitutes the social. We simply tend to imagine the social in terms of everyday life.

Can we approach a more specific definition of everyday life? One suggestion is that the everyday in a literal sense refers to ‘a host of routine activities, private and public, carried out on a regular, if not actually daily, basis; such as eating, sleeping, working, commuting, shopping and so on’ (Ferguson, 2009, p. 164). These activities, although trivial at first sight, turn out to be rich sources of information about who we are in a postmodern era. I will soon illustrate this by referring to some seemingly trivial events and objects (such as a tube of toothpaste) that turn out to be richly informative about our lives. Furthermore, as Ferguson adds, the everyday is ‘the inclusive arena in which occasional, incidental, and unusual events also take place’ (p. 164). So not only the commonplace, the daily, but also the exceptional can be a significant object for everyday life analyses. It is not the prevalence of something that makes it ordinary; rather, something is ordinary because it appears in our everyday lives. A divorce, for example, must be considered an everyday life event, even if the person is only divorced once in her life.

As these initial analyses testify, it is notoriously difficult to define everyday life. There are numerous ways of characterising the term and it seems to be ‘overloaded with meaning’ (Jacobsen, 2009, p. 9). Still, the term directs our attention in an important directi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Making less more
• Part I
• Part II
• References
• Index