Anna Bagnoli

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

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.

Focus groups with young people: a participatory approach to research planning

In this paper we present our experiences of conducting focus groups with young people as part of a participatory approach to research design and participant recruitment. The research is a prospective, 10-year, qualitative, longitudinal project investigating young peoples daily lives, relationships, and identities, and the ways these change over time. It adopts a multi-method approach in which each participant has a choice about which methods to be involved with. Part of the project planning and recruitment was completed through focus groups held in schools across metropolitan and rural West Yorkshire with young people aged 13. The focus groups enabled us to recruit participants from a variety of backgrounds. They were also an important medium through which to elicit the views of young people (which were perceptively and constructively critical) about project design, methods development, and dissemination events. The paper focuses on what we learnt from these focus groups and considers the value of engaging participants in designing qualitative research.

AT A CROSSROADS: Contemporary lives between fate and choice

Contemporary societies have been pictured as marked by an unprecedented degree of uncertainty and by the extensive presence of a large variety of risks, which are experienced on both a personal and a global scale (Beck 1992). In the past decades the popular individualisation thesis has pointed out how the dissolution of the traditional order has given way to a process of ‘disembedding’ (Giddens 1991), which has meant emancipation from the grip of authority, yet also disorientation and insecurity. It is argued that in conditions of late modernity people are required to develop a reflexive attitude, and urged to learn the skills to self-reconstruct in order to be able to respond to the changing circumstances that may crop up at any turn in their lives. People find themselves with new freedoms to construct their own life plans, yet they are also confronted with the necessity and burden of making constant choices. In this uncertain scenario, it may therefore be possible for some to construct ‘biographies of choice’ (Beck 1992), that is, courses of action and life plans that are reflexively put together and typically experienced by actors as essentially individual accomplishments, with no connection to wider social processes. However, the extent to which people actually feel disembedded from traditional structures, and the degree of reflexivity and ability to selfreconstruct which they may exert in their everyday lives may considerably vary in relation to their position in the social structure, which continues to be central in people’s lives. Individualisation theorists have overlooked the differential impact that the consequences of the risk society may have on individual biographies, depending on people’s own position in terms of

‘Researching Identities with Multi-method Autobiographies’:

In order to research the identities of young people in contemporary Europe I designed a participatory project which relied on the application of a multi-method autobiographical approach. The project fully involved the young participants as co-researchers, assigning them a guiding role, and allowing them to provide the identity narratives which were most significant to them, in their own terms. The multi-method autobiographical approach that I present here was designed so to study identities as dialogical constructions, on the basis of a holistic ‘self+other’ model, which assumes that the dimension of dialogue and the relationship with the other from us are fundamental in the process of identity definition. Main aim of the approach was encouraging reflexivity, and it offered a variety of media for the young participants to narrate their life-stories. Centring on the production of a one-week diary, it involved also two open- ended interviews, as well as the use of visual methods, the projective technique of the self-portrait, and the collection of participants’ own photographs. The young people responded enthusiastically to this methodology, which sometimes also empowered them over their lives. Its flexible and open structure effectively allowed them to guide the research in the directions they wanted, being sensitive to their own preferred ways of self-expression. The use of written and visual methods significantly widened the area of research, accessing data that might have been difficult to gather otherwise.

ON ‘AN INTROSPECTIVE JOURNEY’

ABSTRACT To what extent can the experience of travel become also a journey of self-discovery leading to a reconstruction of identities? Taking ‘a year out’, inter-railing, going abroad on a language study or an au pair stay: these are some of the most common forms of youth travel in contemporary Europe. As almost ritual ways of moving, they may be likened to initiation journeys. This article explores the significance of travel in young peoples lives, and in the process of identity construction. These issues are explored in the travel narratives of a group of young people who took part in an autobiographical and mixed method project on identities which was conducted in England and Italy. The meaning of travel in these young peoples lives is appreciated through their own words and written diaries. Young peoples agency and role in constructing their travel experiences is analysed, as well as the extent to which fate, in the shape of societal expectations and norms, as well as parental intervention, may actually predefine some forms of travel as ‘institutional’ rites of passage. Travels may offer a scenario for an individualised construction of self, which may also involve the co-participation of significant others. The experiences of young women backpackers in this study point out how travelling can still be a way of defining alternative gender identities.

BETWEEN OUTCAST AND OUTSIDER: CONSTRUCTING THE IDENTITY OF THE FOREIGNER

ABSTRACT Through the adoption of a dialogical, self+other model, which can appreciate the presence of different discourses and cultures within the self, I have investigated the identities of young migrants. A sample of young Europeans participated in the research, narrating their migration stories with a variety of autobiographical methods which integrated interviews with diaries and visual media. Young migrants refer to their condition as foreigners as an ambivalent one, which, involving also much suffering, oscillates between two different ways of positioning the self. A dream of return is always dominant for the outcasts, who either feel at the margins or do not wish to immerse themselves any deeper in the society they have moved into. Migrating means instead reaching a different level of experience and knowledge of the world to the outsiders, who can successfully translate the detachment of their special positioning into a creative and hybrid reconstruction of identities.

Imagining the Lost Other: The Experience of Loss and the Process of Identity Construction in Young People

This article looks at the significance that the experience of loss may assume in the process of identity construction. Within a theoretical framework that views identities as intrinsically defined by the dialogue with the other, losing the other represents the negative case and is discussed in relation to the experiences of death of a significant other and of parental divorce. These two experiences are often linked in the literature because both are associated to the psychological process of mourning. On the basis of the life stories narrated by 10 young people who were among the participants in a wider autobiographical project on identities, attention is paid to the psychological mechanisms through which the ability to reconstruct a relationship with the lost one on an imaginary level may be important to the definition of the young persons identity.

Making Sense of Mixed Method Narratives: Young People’s Identities, Life-Plans, and Time Orientations

Mixing methods has become more popular in recent years, and in research with young people an increasing number of projects are nowadays making use of a range of research tools, often within a participatory framework. As Brannen (2005) argues, mixed methods can enhance creativity, by offering a range of ways of addressing research questions. Mixing methods does however have its risks and it is not unproblematic. The logic and purpose with which methods are combined in a study should be made explicit by researchers, since they will inform the ways in which data are brought together analytically (Mason, 2006). Corroboration is only one possible strategy for combining results from different data at the analytical stage: others include elaboration or expansion, initiation, complementarity and contradiction (Brannen, 2005).