Jennifer Mason

Negotiating Family Responsibilities

1. Understanding Family Responsibilities. 2. Balancing Responsibilities: Dependence and Independence. 3. Negotiating Commitments Over Time. 4. Making Legitimate Excuses. 5. Reputations and Moral Identitiesin the Negotiation of Family Responsibilities. 6. Conclusion. Appendices

Mixing methods in a qualitatively driven way

This article makes an argument for a ‘qualitatively driven’ approach to mixing methods. It focuses on the value of mixed-methods approaches for researching questions about social experience and lived realities. It suggests that ‘qualitative thinking’ is a useful starting point for mixing methods, but that it is ultimately more helpful to think in terms of multi-dimensional research strategies that transcend or even subvert the so-called qualitative-quantitative divide. Mixing methods helps us to think creatively and ‘outside the box’, to theorize beyond the micro-macro divide, and to enhance and extend the logic of qualitative explanation. Mixed-methods approaches raise challenges in reconciling different epistemologies and ontologies, and in integrating different forms of data and knowledge. The article argues that we should think more in terms of ‘meshing’ or ‘linking’ than ‘integrating’ data and method. It goes on to argue for the development of ‘multi-nodal’ dialogic explanations that allow the distinctiveness of different methods and approaches to be held in creative tension. The article concludes with a discussion of qualitatively derived principles for mixing methods.

Personal narratives, relational selves: residential histories in the living and telling

This article is set in the context of debates about how far social identity and agency should be seen as individualised or relational concepts. It examines how people in a qualitative study in the North of England constructed personal narratives about their residential histories. These were fundamentally about identity and agency, because they centred upon ‘what mattered’ more widely to the narrator, and upon what had constrained or enabled action and change in their life. The narratives were characterised by contextuality, contingency and in particular by relationality. Four styles of relational narrative are explored: relational inclusion and co-presence, relational participation, relational constraint and conflict, and relational individualism. Overall, it is argued that both agency and identity need to be understood relationally, and that through their narratives people in the study were constructing relational selves. It is suggested that a misreading of personal narrative as an individualistic discursive form has fuelled the hold of the concept of individualism on popular and sociological imagination, in the face of increasingly compelling empirical evidence about the extent and nature of peoples connectivity with others.

Coming to our senses?: A critical approach to sensory methodology

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.

Ambivalence and the paradoxes of grandparenting

This paper focuses on ‘normative talk’ about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data – ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents ‘should and should not’ do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are not easy to reconcile with the everyday realities of grandparenting. The study found that norms of parenting and also of self determination were also very important for the grandparents in the study. They had a keen sense of what being a ‘good parent’ (to their own adult children) should mean – especially in terms of allowing them to be independent – but this could sometimes conflict with their sense of responsibility to descendant generations of grandchildren. Using the concept of ambivalence and drawing on the accounts of grandparents in the study, the paper explores and offers an explanation for both the coexistence and conflict between different sets of norms, as well as for the remarkably high levels of consensus about ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the limitations of the data and the analysis, and with suggestions for the development of further work in this area.

'Re-Using' Qualitative Data: on the Merits of an Investigative Epistemology

This article is written to accompany and respond to the articles that form the special issue of Sociological Research Online on ‘Re-using qualitative data’. It argues that the articles are a welcome contribution, because they help to move the debate beyond moralistic and polarised positions, to demonstrate instead what sociologists can achieve by ‘re-using’ qualitative data. The article argues for an investigative epistemology and investigative practices to guide qualitative data use and ‘re-use’, and suggests that this is particularly important in the current social research climate.

Difficult friendships and ontological insecurity

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge ones sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self-identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting ‘old’ friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.

Facet Methodology: The Case for an Inventive Research Orientation

This article puts the case for a new and evolving research approach or orientation – ‘facet methodology’, developed in collaborative team based working at Realities at the Morgan Centre, a ‘Node’ of the UK National Centre for Research Methods. Research fields are seen as constructed through combinations and constellations of facets as we might see in a cut gemstone, where facets refract and intensify light, taking up the background, and creating flashes of depth and colour as well as patches of shadow. In facet methodology, the gemstone is the overall research question or problematic, and facets are conceived as different methodological-substantive planes and surfaces, which are designed to be capable of casting and refracting light in a variety of ways that help to define the overall object of concern by creating flashes of insight. Facets involve different lines of enquiry, and different ways of seeing. The approach aims to create a strategically illuminating set of facets in relation to specific research concerns and questions. The rigour of the approach comes ultimately from researcher skill, inventiveness, creativity, insight and imagination – in deciding how best to carve the facets so that they catch the light in the best possible way. The paper argues that facet methodology can make a contribution to debates about the ‘politics of method’, especially in relation to its emphasis on the significance of flashes of insight rather than the production of ‘maximum data’ of a descriptive kind.

Divorce, remarriage and family obligations

This article is concerned with relationships between adult kin following divorce, and especially those relationships between former in-laws. Questions are raised about the circumstances under which these continue, the extent to which they provide the basis for practical assistance, and how far the continuation of such relationships after divorce is seen as normatively appropriate. Data from a study of family obligations are used to discuss these questions. The authors conclude that the continuation of close supportive relationships can happen, but that this is both rare and unpredictable. Where it does occur, it is as much a product of the history of the relationships between the individuals concerned, as of their genealogical locations in relation to each other. Therefore it cannot be assumed that ex in-law relationships could represent a reliable basis for practical support. However, where supportive relationships do continue they are welcomed by the participants and the situation is widely approved of at a normative level.

Conjuring up traditions: atmospheres, eras and family Christmases

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and ‘detraditionalization’, sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in peoples lives. Based on a qualitative study of ‘Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives’, this article explores peoples experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multidimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as ‘traditions’, people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters – sometimes quite profoundly – in peoples lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time – past, present and anticipated for descendant generations – into packages of generalized ‘time out of time’, characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras – more than broad or macro understandings of ‘tradition’ – are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are ‘indexed’ in and through time.