Kahryn Hughes

Accessing Socially Excluded People — Trust and the Gatekeeper in the Researcher-Participant Relationship

This paper describes methodological findings from research to recruit and research hard-to-reach socially excluded people. We review the ways in which researchers have used particular strategies to access hard-to-reach individuals and groups and note that little attention has been given to understanding the implications of the nature of the trust relationship between researcher and participant. Gatekeepers invariably play a role in accessing socially excluded people in research, yet discussion to date invariably focuses on the instrumental role gatekeepers play in facilitating researchers’ access. In this paper we explore the possibilities for analysing relationships in terms of trust and distrust between gatekeeper and socially excluded participant. Our analysis considers the different kinds of relationships that exist between gatekeepers and socially excluded people and, in particular, the relationships of power between gatekeepers and socially excluded people. Insights into the nature of trust among socially excluded people will also be considered. Finally, we discuss how size and use of social networks among socially excluded groups and perceptions of risk in interactions with gatekeepers are important to understanding the possibilities for trustful relationships, and for meaningful and successful access for researchers to socially excluded individuals and groups.

‘Recession, it's all the same to us son’: the longitudinal experience (1999–2010) of deprivation

This paper reports on qualitative longitudinal research exploring deprivation in a low-income estate between 1999 and 2010. It draws on data from three studies and a continued engagement with participants between these studies. The paper explores the lived experience of deprivation in households, the interdependencies between households, and the experience of service provision to address basic need. A longitudinal social space of vulnerability is described that considers the effects of multiple deprivation, limited resilience, and (in)appropriate service provision. It further considers the impact of the most recent recession (from 2008 onwards) and concludes that its effects are eclipsed by earlier recessions.

Towards a Developmental Understanding of Happiness

In this paper we centrally explore the ‘sociogenesis’ of the concept of happiness: the social processes by which it came to be a term appropriated by different practitioner communities - from policy makers to academics, from a burgeoning self-help industry to advocates of positive psychology. Our core focus is upon shifting historical understandings of the term and how these relate to more general social processes. Our aim in this paper is not to present a definitive history of happiness, but rather something of the overall direction of changes in dominant approaches to, and understandings of, happiness particularly within what we might broadly term ‘the human sciences’. Ultimately, we offer a series of tentative reflections upon the implications of a developmental approach to happiness for sociological analyses of this increasingly popular area of concern.

Beyond the Symbolic: A Relational Approach to Dirty Work through a Study of Refuse Collectors and Street Cleaners

Drawing on a relational approach and based on an ethnographic study of street cleaners and refuse collectors, we redress a tendency towards an overemphasis on the discursive by exploring the co-constitution of the material and symbolic dynamics of dirt. We show how esteem-enhancing strategies that draw on the symbolic can be both supported and undermined by the physicality of dirt, and how relations of power are rooted in subordinating material conditions. Through employing Hardy and Thomas’s taxonomy of objects, practice, bodies and space, we develop a fuller understanding of how the symbolic and material are fundamentally entwined within dirty work, and suggest that a neglect of the latter might foster a false optimism regarding worker experiences.

Vulnerability, Intergenerational Exchange and the Conscience of Generations

In this chapter, we are concerned with grandparents between 35 and 55 years old. The grandparents’ experiences reported here are all firmly positioned in a group recently labelled the precariat (Standing 2011); a group churning between low-paid low-skilled employment, underemployment and unemployment (Shildrick et al. 2012) and characterized by high levels of insecurity on all measures of economic, social and cultural capital (Savage et al. 2013). This is a relatively large social class and our focus in this chapter is an important minority of excluded low-income grandparents and their families. Grandparents in the UK are getting older, reflecting increasing life expectancies. There are, however, approximately 1.5 million grandparents under the age of 50 years. Furthermore, investigation by Grandparents Plus (2009) of the difference in age of grandparents reveals important divergence between socioeconomic groups. Women from a working-class background are four times more likely to become a grandmother before their 50th birthday when compared with middle-class groups.

Qualitative Secondary Analysis: Building Longitudinal Samples to Understand Men’s Generational Identities in Low Income Contexts

There have been significant developments in methods of qualitative secondary analysis (QSA), prompted in part by growth in infrastructure for archiving and sharing qualitative data, facilitating reuse. Building from these developments, this article presents QSA that brings together subsamples of men in low income contexts from two qualitative longitudinal datasets produced under Timescapes, demonstrating the complex linkages between them, and addressing two key questions. First, in bringing these two datasets together, is it possible to build an intergenerational sample of men in low income contexts to further our understanding of their generational identities and intergenerational experiences? Second, what sorts of intergenerational, or intragenerational, analyses are possible? We conclude that it was not possible to build a straightforwardly vertical intergenerational sample, but intragenerational cohort analyses of generational identities have enabled insights into the dynamic relational processes productive of longitudinal experiences of marginalization and vulnerability for men living in low income contexts.

The time of our lives: towards a temporal understanding of internet gambling

Based on a study examining Internet gambling in the home this paper problematizes the current ubiquitous focus on the solitary, isolated gambler. It does so by considering the insights provided by a focus on how internet gambling practices and the internet gambler become seen as a ‘problem’. We argue that understanding such identity migration (from gambling to problem gambling; addict to non-addict; gambler to non-gambler) requires us to move beyond a focus on the individual, and consider how participants’ families contextualise and are re/produced in this reshaping of identities. In undertaking these analyses, we found that re-articulations of time were core to participants’ narratives which described shift ing experiences of time, its expansion and its contraction in gambling; that meanings of ‘time’ were emotionally charged; and crucial in how problem gambling was addressed and resolved, within families. Finally, we consider how reshaping practices within and by families around their own and the gamblers’ identities explicitly depended on the temporal re-integration of the ‘addict’ into their family timescapes.

Practices of Display: The Framing and Changing of Internet Gambling Behaviours in Families

This chapter will consider the additions and affordances the concept of ‘display’ (Finch 2007) offers in analyses of inter-relational responses to problematic Internet gambling. It will also seek to develop this concept by considering it in both the domestic and public sphere and by examining the issues which arise when family members are not available for ‘display’. Display activities in these analyses are not those directly of the gambling, but relate explicitly to family practices of display, and how a perceived absence of these impacts on familial relationships and, often later, of attempts to renew affected relationships.