Abstract
In this first of a series of three progress reports on qualitative methods we scope recent qualitative research in human geography through the prism of the interview. Across diverse subfields the interview persists as the dominant means of understanding, though increasingly supplemented or complemented by other means such as diaries and autobiography. Capturing social life as it happens is emerging in response to theoretical developments that encourage new methodological thinking, and includes cities and buildings being thought of as methodological resources as well as sites. These point to concerns with the materiality and inventiveness of method that will be explored in subsequent reports.
Challenges to qualitative researchers to engage with new forms of social life, especially those that are digitally mediated, digitally produced and increasingly mobile, have gained traction over the past two years (Poorthuis et al., 2014). Across the social sciences more broadly, what constitutes method, data and research remains questioned, theoretically, as scholars consider the social lives of method (Lury and Wakeford, 2012; Ruppert et al., 2013), and empirically, as the proliferation and public availability of social data take qualitative research and data outside the domain of the academy. In the last progress report on qualitative methods in this journal, Dydia DeLyser and Daniel Sui (2013) detailed the endurance of the interview as a key method of qualitative geographical research, in spite of, or perhaps because of, this plethora of new ways of collecting and analysing qualitative data. The past few years of qualitative research in human geography confirm the endurance of the interview, though in enriched form. Thus in this, the first of our three progress reports, we reflect further on the endurance of the interview. We use this as a means of taking stock before launching an in-depth investigation of the materiality of method and new forms of authorship and collaboration in subsequent reports. Our argument here is that while interviews remain the mainstay of qualitative methods, they do not do so in isolation, being used as a supplement or complement to other means of approaching, analysing and intervening in social life. This enriching of the interview includes the oft-commented digitalization of social life, as well as an increasingly prevalent concern with approaching life ‘on the move’ or ‘as it happens’. Enrichment is also occurring through ongoing critical reflection across the different theoretical traditions of qualitative geographic research. Together, as we outline in the following three sections, these trends are taking qualitative methods in new directions whose potential remains unrealized.
I Interviews
Qualitative interviews – semi-structured or unstructured, with individuals or with groups – continue to predominate in the social and cultural geography subdisciplines. Here, in a broadly hermeneutic tradition, interviews are used in understanding interpretations, experiences and spatialities of social life. This includes examinations of bodily and gendered experiences, such as of sweat (Waitt, 2014), as well as diverse engagements with complex meanings of home (Gorman-Murray, 2014), that are illustrative of the ways in which interviews deepen understanding of people’s relations to, and shaping of, place. How gender, especially masculinity, is constructed and experienced, across diverse spaces such as work (Warren, 2014), home (Gorman-Murray, 2014) and migration (Jackson, 2014; Ye, 2014) is also explored through qualitative interviews, which, in the case of Schapendonk and Steel (2014) take the form of life stories. Nonetheless, an important characteristic of qualitative interviews over the past few years is their use to shed light on issues of concern to other human geography subdisciplines, especially economic and political geography. For example, Brian Hracs et al. (2013) use key informant interviews with independent fashion designers and musicians, alongside participation in local markets as fashion designers and musicians, to understand strategies of competition and distinction in these creative industries. Qualitative engagement is key to Carol Ekinsmyth’s (2014) investigation of the management of work-life balance for ‘mumpreneurs’, continuing a longstanding preference for qualitative interviews in feminist economic geography. In these political and economic geography contexts, the reliance on qualitative interviews is driven largely by theoretical concerns to prise open economic processes and strategies.
A further distinguishing feature of much of this work is that interviews – as a relatively conventional method – are approached in fresh ways. David Bissell’s work on commuting, for instance, uses the long unstructured interview as an ‘improvised encounter’ (2014: 1951) to unpack the ways in which ‘the virtuality of the past inheres in the present’ (2014: 1947). Methodologically, Bissell’s work is most interesting in its advocacy of a ‘self-reflective’ mode in the conduct and interpretation of qualitative interviews, which in his case yields significant insights into the temporalities of travel without the assistance of mobile methods. Likewise, Russel Hitchings (2012) argues against the view that talking and practice are mutually exclusive. Instead, and, as picked up in a number of recent pieces (e.g. Kent, 2014), people can talk about their practices in meaningful ways for researchers. For some scholars, however, this is far from a settled point, leading to the various means of supplementing and enriching the interview that are discussed below. A final fresh perspective on the interview is being provided through methodological engagement with psychoanalysis. Alberto Vanolo (2014) uses autobiography to reflect on the multiple spatialities – relational, emotional, physical and disciplinary – of psychoanalysis, and in so doing suggests new ways of approaching such therapeutic encounters.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given societal and intellectual concerns with living in a changing climate, qualitative methods abound in the rich subfield of geography, investigating the governance and lived experiences of climate change. Considerations of household responses to, and cultures of, energy and its transitions are reliant on interviews of various kinds – with individuals, nuclear households, and multi-generational households (Gibson et al., 2013; Klocker et al., 2012). Less conventionally, the political economy and political ecology of carbon markets and carbon governance is equally reliant on the interview. Andrew McGregor and colleagues (2015) use interviews with a diverse range of actors involved in forest governance at national, international and local scales to explore practices of governmentality (see also Lovell, 2014). Sophie Webber (2013) pursues the claim that vulnerability is performed rather than ontologically given through detailed interviews with government elites of Kiribati, and Pauline McGuirk and colleagues (2014) likewise dissect governance assemblages with a combination of interviews and documentary analysis. Though reflection on interview processes and the associated production of knowledge in this research does occur, it is limited in comparison to other uses of the interview in human geography. Indeed, a recent meta-review of 12 years of qualitative climate change research published in the journal Global Environmental Change (which included contributions from human geography) found explanation of means of data collection and analysis sparse in the papers, and an even sparser consideration of researcher positionality (Nielsen and D’haen, 2014).
Critical reflection – of the politics of methodologies, the conduct of research and the researcher – has long been central to qualitative methods across human geography, though arguably most pronounced in feminist geography. This remains the case, where an ongoing reflective impulse is manifest in a number of feminist pieces using autobiography and ethnography. Linda McDowell (2014) deliberates on the knowledges made possible and/or closed down by qualitative and quantitative methods. She compares autobiographical and statistical renderings of women’s working lives, arguing that together they enable a rich, multi-generational and context-aware account of the intersections of gender, migration and class across the past century. Sarah Marie Hall (2014) casts a critical eye over the spatial and relational dimensions of ethnographic research with families, noting that researchers cannot become members of families in the same way that they may become accepted as members of communities in different ethnographic sites. Feminist reflections on the research process itself are provided by Emily Billo and Nancy Hiemstra (2012), for whom the disjunctures between research as planned and research as realized can never be fully anticipated. For Billo and Hiemstra (2012) rendering these disjunctures and the processes of ongoing reflexivity more visible is a necessary first step to improving field-based qualitative research.
II Supplementing the interview
Over 10 years on from Alan Latham’s (2003) exposition of photo, diary, and interview constellations in human geography research, there is now an abundant use of diaries across human geography. These include solicited research diaries (e.g. Morrison, 2012), as well as methods that tap into other senses and means of representation beyond the textual. Photo diaries, photos elicited from research participants and photo journals have become central to not only depicting place but for developing new conceptions of place. Ann Bartos (2012) asked children to take photos of their surroundings, and, in combination with interviews, demonstrated the contours of children’s everyday politics. For Julia Bennett (2014) a phenomenological approach to the social and material constitution of place as a gift necessarily includes photos of significant places, supplemented by interviews and family narratives, an approach echoed in the study by Darrin Hodgetts et al. (2012) of homelessness in Auckland. Yet across these studies, Gillian Rose’s (2012) comment about the limited visual analysis tools of human geographers remains valid: visual representations rarely appear in these texts (though, admittedly, this may be due to ethical concerns and/or constraints), and the analytical engagement with photos as visual media remains quite limited.
Sensory diaries pose further challenges to text- and visually-based qualitative analysis, though again the challenge has been incompletely taken up thus far. Sarah Pink and Kerstin Leder Mackley’s (2014) sensory ethnography traced the lighting and mood of the routine of going to bed, while Michele Duffy and Gordon Waitt (2013) collected sound diaries – recordings of everyday sounds – as precursors to interviews and their subsequent analytical development of the concept of sonic rhythms of home life. In an important recent intervention, Michael Gallagher and Jonathon Prior (2014: 270) comment that audio in human geography is ‘not seen as a reliable witness: too uncertain to provide a source of valid knowledge’. Audio, they argue, is likely to be analysed and communicated in written form (as transcripts and written publications) rather than engaged with as distinctive forms of data. As availability of, and familiarity with, technologies of recording social life expand – especially aurally and visually –the challenge for human geographers will be to recognize and appropriate the specificity of these data in their analyses.
Interviews are also being digitally augmented, in line with Oona Morrow et al.’s (2014: 526) recent designation of online spaces as perhaps ‘the next frontier in qualitative human subjects research’. Small mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablet computers) and mobile apps are increasingly being used to support data collection and storage and are especially convenient for work done on the road and out of the office as they enable researchers to leverage the cameras, microphones and other tools inherent in mobiles to do interviews and collect a wide variety of data. Katherine Burnett’s (2014) discussion of the commodification of poverty, for example, uses food-related blogs like Yelp and UrbanSpoon as a data source, while Eva Thulin and Bertil Vilhelmson (2014) attempt to enrich discussions of migration by exploring the role of the internet in people’s migration plans. Qualitative analysis of online spaces and fora are being used to enrich political geography, such as Anthony Ince et al.’s (2015) discourse analysis of the Bear Facts internet discussion forum to understand labour relations, or Jessica McLean and Sophia Maalsen’s (2013) investigation of online spaces of resistance. In these instances, digital data are used as a source to answer geographical questions.
While analysing digital enunciations in somewhat conventional terms continues to construct geographical knowledges, explorations of the specificity of digital worlds for qualitative human geography are creating new insights. Anna de Jong (2015) argues that qualitative human geographers need to take the specific affordances of online technologies into account when conducting research. Using the example of Facebook, she suggests that the temporality of fieldwork is altered, as Facebook and the smartphone enabled ‘access to participants’ in-the-moment experiences’ (p. 5). The political and ethical dimensions of research in online spaces are explored by Oona Morrow et al. (2014), underscoring the porous, multiple and relational character of such spaces. While reflective and transformative in intent, the performative dimensions of method remain opaque in much of this geographical work. In contrast, the exploitation of the affordances of web 2.0 and undertake methodological interventions that are both constitutive of the material gathered and troublesome to method itself, are taking hold in other disciplines like sociology. To take one example, Alex Wilkie, Mike Michael and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s (2015) project collected responses to energy demand reduction using social media. Innovatively, random, and sometimes bizarre, tweets were made by a (ro)Bot or fictional twitter handle in an attempt to provoke reaction from users/readers/research participants. We look forward to replications and extensions of that approach, not simply for its own sake but also to prompt a discussion of the limits and possibilities of research in a digital age in light of the ethical concerns at the forefront of much qualitative research in human geography.
III Capturing social life ‘as it happens’: Beyond the interview?
In this last section we explicate a theme that has been implicit so far: the desire and capacity of qualitative research to capture social life ‘as it happens’, or contemporaneously. This impulse has multiple methodological and theoretical origins. Theoretically, interest in the non- and/or more-than-representational turns attention away from representations of experience and toward the material and the affective. Qualitative human geography has thus far incompletely embraced these ways of knowing, and a fuller discussion will comprise our next report. Nonetheless, qualitative research of the past few years has taken on board more empirical and methodological drivers of interest in life as it happens, including the proliferation and critique of ‘mobile methods’ canvassed in previous reports, the more widespread availability of digital data on the minutiae of daily life, and critiques that interviews are performances or constructed narratives rather than one-to-one reflections of daily life. As a result, diaries, mobile interviews, audio and video recordings of daily events, time and geocoded reflections are emergent methods. We are increasingly seeing interviews used as mechanisms to engage with practices on-the-go, sometimes with intriguing outcomes.
The long tradition of travel diaries as a means of understanding where, why and how people travel continues, as does their supplementation with interviews to examine why and how travel fits in with perceptions and practices (see Berg et al., 2014; Nyblom, 2014). Much has been written in this journal and elsewhere about mobile methods and their applicability for travel (see Cresswell, 2012). For the purposes of this review, most interesting are reflections on interviews conducted on the move. Virgile Collin-Lange (2011) investigated car cruising in Norway, using interviews with drivers while they were cruising, and noted the difficulties he encountered with gaining participants’ trust and the ways that providing food seemed to encourage conversation. These difficulties, however, stemmed as much from the perceptions of the youthful participants as from the mobility of the research practice. Novoa (2014) doesn’t recall such difficulties in her account of a mobile ethnography with Portuguese lorry drivers. Playing with the porosity of fluidity and fixity, mobility and stasis, she explicates the ways in which the drivers ‘live in a kind of nationalized nutshell on wheels’ (p. 2835). In these cases, interviews on the move were driven as much by the focus of the research – trucks and cars – as by an explicit engagement with the theme of mobility.
Another stream of research that methodologically makes use of and aligns with the specifics of the social situation is a growing vein that exploits the city as a methodological tool: a material and social space that is an active methodological resource as much as a field site (Holton and Riley, 2014). Here, interviews in and of the city and its buildings are an emerging and rich focus. This includes conducting interviews about particular spaces (Lobo, 2013) and replicating popular media’s ‘vox pop’ street interviews (Richardson et al., 2014) in order to garner real-time reactions to events and places. Phil Jones and James Evans (2012) take these one step further. They tracked research participants with GPS as well as asked them to reflect on their experiences as they moved through different parts of the city. Words and sentiments were then geolocated, producing ‘spatial transcripts’ that explicitly connected feelings and place, such as feelings of pleasure riding a bike while overlooking a traffic jam from a freeway overpass. Ignaz Strebel’s (2014) further reflections on the intersections of interviews and the city take both qualitative and quantitative human geographers in interesting new directions. He asks what researchers actually do when delivering a questionnaire, and answers this through extensive video recordings of street interviews. Adopting a method far beyond the interview – ethnomethodology – he conducts a visual and conversational analysis of how order and sense was produced through the interview encounter. This analysis enables him to uniquely link qualitative and quantitative traditions in human geography, as well as draw conclusions about the place of the city as a material influence on not just interview processes but also on the data collected.
If the city constructs the interview and shapes the information collected, then so too do the other sites in which qualitative data are collected. Qualitative methods that incorporate tours of relevant sites – especially home – as precursors or complements of interviews have long been used (e.g. Power, 2005). Recent interventions have attempted to explicitly theorize these ‘show us your home/garden/building, etc.’ activities as a means to ‘activate the socio-material eventfulness’ of architecture highlighted in material perspectives on the social world (Jacobs et al., 2012: 131). These have recently been translated into spaces beyond the domestic in offering considerable insight into the materiality of identities and experiences. Andrew Warren’s (2014) exploration of contemporary surfboard manufacturing supplemented semi-structured interviews with both guided workshop tours and working alongside the workers, which underpinned, he argued, a richer understanding of the materiality and labour of surfboard manufacturing. Ignaz Strebel (2011) extends the technique to the work of concierges responsible for high-rise buildings. After accompanying, talking with, and video-recording the concierges as they methodically check each floor and stairwell of multiple buildings, Strebel maps their routines and also presents a detailed ethnomethodological account of their movements, gestures and interactions. In these more recent cases, the material and performative impulses of actor-network theory are married with the analytical and methodological techniques of ethnomethodology and visual analysis.
IV Conclusion
Qualitative research in human geography continues to rely on the interview, though in enriched form. It is firstly enriched through an expansion of forms of collecting information to supplement the interview – social media, video, diaries, following people and things – in parallel with deepening critical reflection. Intriguingly, though, reflective impulses on the different forms of knowledge constructed through these methods, and the politics of research processes, continue to emanate most strongly from feminist scholarship. Qualitative research through the interview is, secondly, enriched through an expanded emphasis in human geography on the socio-materiality of human life and interrogation of the concept of representation in constructing knowledge. These theories pose challenges that are both methodological and epistemological: what counts as knowledge, and what is the place of methodologies that deliberately transform rather than simply reflect the world being examined. Together, these two forms of enrichment – continuing methodological reflection and socio-material theoretical frameworks – are likely to take both interviews and methods in new directions in the near future. Thus, in the next two reports, we turn our attention to the take-up and implications of more radical departures that are beginning to take hold: inventive methods (Lury, 2012) and new means of collaboration, authorship and knowledge creation.