Fluent Essays

INSTRUCTIONS This assignment will be submitted to Turnitin®. Objective: Understand and explain the principles of the quantitative and qualitative research process, and how it could be effectively used in program evaluation Program Outcome: Create a community of students committed to serving the public interest. This assignment focuses on the use of qualitative and quantitative methods used to conduct program evaluation. In your report, consider how mixed methods in program evaluation could be used to collect and analyze data for a specific report on a program that uses mixed methods. Consider how mixed methods could be used to collect and analyze data for a program evaluation.  Think of a specific program and give some detailed examples of both quantitative and qualitative modes of data collection.   Discuss how these might complement each other.  Sociology 2015, Vol. 49(5) 970 –987 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0038038515578993 soc.sagepub.com Telling Moments and Everyday Experience: Multiple Methods Research on Couple Relationships and Personal Lives Jacqui Gabb The Open University, UK Janet Fink University of Huddersfield, UK Abstract Everyday moments and ordinary gestures create the texture of long-term couple relationships. In this article we demonstrate how, by refining our research tools and conceptual imagination, we can better understand these vibrant and visceral relationships. The ‘moments approach’ that we propose provides a lens through which to focus in on couples’ everyday experiences, to gain insight on processes, meanings and cross-cutting analytical themes whilst ensuring that feelings and emotionality remain firmly attached. Calling attention to everyday relationship practices, we draw on empirical research to illustrate and advance our conceptual and methodological argument. The Enduring Love? study included an online survey (n = 5445) and multi-sensory qualitative research with couples (n = 50) to interrogate how they experience, understand and sustain their long-term relationships. Keywords couple relationships, everyday experience, mixed methods, moments approach, relationship practices Introduction Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of somethings dreamed up in the course of the things. (Stewart, 2007: 9) Corresponding author: Jacqui Gabb, The Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK. Email: [email protected] 578993 SOC0010.1177/0038038515578993SociologyGabb and Fink research-article2015 Article by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ Gabb and Fink 971 In her book Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart endeavours to slow down the pace of analytical thinking as a means of speaking to and taking account of complex and uncer- tain objects, ‘to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form; to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate’ (2007: 4). In so doing Stewart resists analytical closure and seeks to retain the ‘messiness’ (Daly, 2003; Gabb, 2009, 2011) or, in her terms, the complexity and uncertainty which comprise ordinary ‘things’ (Stewart, 2007: 5). In this article we advocate a similar analytical strategy for the study of long-term couple relationships, focusing attention on the incidental, the often unnoticed and the ephemeral which create the texture of such relationships and through which their tensile strength is constituted. Relationships comprise pragmatics and emotions, choices and lack of choice, content- ment and disenchantment – and all the spectrum of feelings and experiences in-between. Research has added significant insight into the range of affective attachments that com- prise intimate life (Duncan and Phillips, 2008; Heaphy et al., 2013; Jamieson et al., 2006; Roseneil, 2005; Smart, 2007), but there remains a particular absence of sociologically- informed studies of couples in long-term relationships, with regard to both the influence of culture, biography and socio-economic factors on their relationship experience and the interiority of their personal lives (Smart, 2007). This is a significant gap not least because couple relationships in contemporary Britain have continuing appeal across the sexual spectrum despite shifts in the configuration of intimacy and intimate living (Giddens, 1991; Jamieson, 1998). Married couples, for example, still head up seven in ten households in Britain, with rates of marriage increasing by 5.3\% between 2011 and 2012 (ONS, 2014), and 46,000 same-sex partnerships being registered between December 2005 and 2010 (ONS, 2011). Through the Enduring Love? study,1 we have sought, therefore, to address this under- researched dimension of heterosexual and non-heterosexual relationships while also sit- uating emotions at the conceptual, methodological and analytical heart of our inquiry. In this we acknowledge the queer critique that has been rallied against ‘the couple’ and coupledom (Wilkinson, 2013) but argue for more nuanced approaches to the conceptual- ization of the couple because of the wide diversity in their lived lives and the different ways in which couples give meaning to and sustain their relationships together over time (see Gabb and Fink, 2015). More specifically in this article we focus on how everyday experience in long-term relationships makes and remakes couple intimacies in dynamic and emotionally charged configurations. To achieve this we deployed a multiple methods, multi-sensory research design to access accounts of vibrant and visceral relationships, foregrounding the everyday and focusing on ordinary moments as a lens through which to examine relationship process, practice and structure. This ‘moments approach’ is, we argue, a dynamic means to advance understandings of patterns of relationship experience, grounded in their bio- graphical contexts and emotional settings. It affords us a way of staying attached to the ‘everydayness’ of relationships (Daly, 2003), providing close-up insights that effectively and affectively capture the essence of relationships. This article illustrates, then, how a moments approach to studying couple relationships and intimate life more generally can open up an analytic crack through which we can better see and shed light on personal by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ 972 Sociology 49(5) experience and thereby facilitate multidimensional analysis of the materiality, temporal- ity and emotionality of everyday lives. To begin, we introduce how the everyday has been deployed in studies of family and intimate life as a means to interrogate and make sense of personal relationships. We situ- ate our research in the context of the ‘practices approach’ which has been so influential in UK family sociology and in the rich tradition of methodological creativity that increas- ingly characterizes this field and emotional geographies more widely. The Enduring Love? study is used to inform the conceptual argument of the article and provide meth- odological illustration. We elucidate how and why we analysed the quantitative and qualitative datasets from the project, paying particular attention to the value and mean- ings of those everyday ordinary moments that were our analytic foci. We argue that such moments shed light on the different patterning of relationship experience we identified in the project’s datasets, including how sex and love, adversities and ambivalences, care and support and the public/private boundary are managed as part of the everyday rela- tionship work that couples do. Our focus on the qualitative data from two couples and two small everyday moments in their relationships is thus intended to exemplify the way a moments approach reveals such patterning and can provoke wider concurrent thematic analysis across each couple’s dataset and the project’s dataset as a whole. In conclusion, the article acknowledges the costs and benefits in using everyday moments to study per- sonal life. The approach is resource intensive, but starting with minutiae and mundanities productively reorients the analytical lens onto the vitality of relationships, as they are lived in both time and space. Everyday Lives and Emotion Our moments approach has at its conceptual and epistemological heart the belief that couple relationships are constituted, experienced and afforded meaning through the eve- ryday. It is informed by an understanding that emotions are embedded in social relations and that moments can be identified as ‘emotional scenarios’, in which micro and macro networks of relations intersect and overlap (Burkitt, 2014: 20). It aims to keep the consti- tutive and iterative process of doing relationships at the forefront of analysis (Morgan, 1996) while calling attention to the interdependent elements that last beyond specific moments of enactment (Phoenix and Brannen, 2013). It also acknowledges the extent to which everyday life informs the conduct and conceptualization of much family research and study of intimate life (Gabb, 2008). In this context, however, everyday life is not simply viewed as a process through which habits (or in Bourdieusian terms habitus) impel the self-governing individual to conform. Routines and practices are vibrant and visceral (Martens et al., 2013) and can be a site of coherence and contestation. Routinization may render invisible the processes and structures through which relationships are understood and afforded meaning, but through iteration and the diurnal what was once different may, over time, become ‘normal’: the marginalized can become mainstream (Heaphy et al., 2013). This temporal dimension of how relationships are made and re-made is crucial: the quotidian of life is dynamic. Experience is embodied and located in the specificity of place (Pink, 2012). Everyday practices are configured and reconfigured over time (Shove et al., 2012). Relationships also involve investments that weave together a shared past, the by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ Gabb and Fink 973 present day and imagined futures, which, in turn, illustrate a diachronic dimension to the everyday. We situate our argument, therefore, within this conceptual framework of the everyday, while at the epistemological core of our proposition is the contention that we need to refine our research tools and conceptual imagination to appreciate the meaningful- ness of everyday ordinary moments in personal life. This attention to the momentary draws on and extends ideas developed in social theorizing. Notably, Anthony Giddens (1991) has characterized ‘fateful moments’ as being a central part of late modernity, playing a significant and formative role in the emergence of individualization. Giddens defines fateful moments as critical turning points when the life of an individual (or collective) shifts (1991: 112–13). Relevant examples here of such ‘crossroads’ would include the decision to get married and/or start a family. Fateful moments are thus associated with key life events and the epipha- nal. In family studies there has been some attention to moments as a way to understand personal life. However, perhaps driven by a Giddensian agenda, the focus has tended to be upon extraordinary or special moments (Larson and Bradney, 1988) or specific dimensions of family life, interrogating phenomenon such as ‘quality time’ (Kremer- Sadlik and Paugh, 2007). Notwithstanding the insights provided through these foci, the momentary concept has, however, been problematized through empirical research, being critiqued for effacing power, and the problematic and provisionality of lived lives (Plumridge and Thomson, 2003). More broadly the momentary has been explored in anthropological contexts through the idea of a ‘revelatory moment’ and its value as an ‘epistemic unit’ through which researcher subjectivity and socio-cultural significance can be examined (Trigger et al., 2012). Autobiographical studies and anecdotal theorizing (Gallop, 2002) use incidental moments to build theoretical understanding from the bottom up, drawing upon the per- sonal as a lens through which new perspectives on relationality can be brought into view (Gabb, 2011). Psycho-social research has explored everyday ‘encounters’ which tip us off balance; ‘moments of undoing’ which have the capacity to make us stop short and think again, perhaps from a new point of departure (Baraitser, 2009: 3). In all these instances moments are used to unsettle simple readings, situating the subject of inquiry, the participant and researcher in biographical and socio-cultural contexts that inform the research process and data generated. We draw upon these different conceptualizations of the momentary but our approach also understands the moment as having an emotional scenario at its core, as we noted above, and moments as where couples feel the immedi- acy of their intimate connections with each other (Burkitt, 2014). Our aim, then, is to demonstrate the value of the everyday ordinary moment as an analytical lens through which to advance understanding of relationship experience and practice. The Enduring Love? Study The Enduring Love? project was a large-scale multiple methods study. A quantitative survey was designed to generate statistical information on relationship qualities, rela- tionship with partner and relationship maintenance, enabling us to scope trends in behav- iour and the factors which signal relationship satisfaction. The survey, primarily implemented online, was completed by 5445 people, including a UK convenience by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ 974 Sociology 49(5) sample of 4494. Because we want to situate data in their particular personal-social con- texts, our analysis is focused on the data from the UK cohort only. The sample for the subsequent qualitative study comprised 50 couples, aged between 18 and 65 years. Of these couples, 70\% were heterosexual and 30\% lesbian, gay, bisex- ual and queer (LGBQ), 50\% were parents and 50\% were couples without children. Our selection of qualitative methods, emotion maps, diaries, individual interviews and photo- elicitation interviews with couples, was informed by a determination to drill down into realms of embodied lived experience. Emotion maps and diaries were completed simul- taneously over the course of one week, with the former designed to locate everyday interactions in the home and depict the emotional dynamic of the couple’s relationship (Gabb, 2009) and the latter to generate temporal data on daily routines and more imme- diately engaged accounts of everyday life. Individual interviews were focused on how relationships work, examining participants’ experiences and relationships across the life course before moving into explorations of their diaries and emotion maps. A series of collages, designed by the research team, were used in the couple interviews and invited participants to reflect on the project’s central research themes: relationship work, physi- cal affection and sex, children and childhoods, money, ‘significant others’, social policy and welfare, and media representations of couple relationships. The complexity of our research design meant that fieldwork with each couple was generally completed over a one to three-month period and, for the majority, took place in the privacy of their home. Survey Data and Everyday Relationship Practices The survey’s design and our analytical strategy drew on the work of others in the quan- titative and mixed methods field (Browne et al., 2013), including psychological research which often deploys quantitative surveys including psychometric scales to advance understandings of relationship satisfaction (for an overview see Hook et al., 2003) and how people understand their couple relationships (Duck, 2007; Mashek and Aron, 2004). For example, in relationship studies a key psychometric scale is the Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State (GRIMS) scale (Rust et al., 1986, 1990). Although the GRIMS scale productively informed our thinking and framing of the Enduring Love? survey statements, we ultimately discounted reusing it, electing instead to ‘go it alone’ and use independent statements that were more attuned to the project’s foci. We situate our analysis and this article, therefore, as part of the growing canon of methodological writing that focuses on the flexibility and fluidity of methods (Hesse-Biber, 2010) and celebrates paradigm and methodological diversity (Denzin et al., 2008). While debate continues on how to resolve the ‘incompatibility’ of underlying paradigms that charac- terize quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g. Cresswell and Clark, 2007; Guba and Lincoln, 1994), we have completed our analysis by simultaneously taking account of the epistemological and methodological issues that are at play when bringing together multiple methods data. Our survey included three sets of multiple choice statements, using Likert scale responses ranging from 1 to 5. These spoke to the structuring interests of the Enduring Love? study overall and enabled us to scope trends in behaviour and the factors which appear to signal relationship satisfaction through responses to individual questions on by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ Gabb and Fink 975 relationship practice. The statistical survey was, therefore, designed to generate vital information on the patterning of relationship experience across a large and diverse con- venience sample. We computed basic descriptive statistics for demographic information and some relationship outcomes. We also computed Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA) and correlation analyses to address more complex research questions including continuous and categorical variables. In advancing a ‘cluster analysis’ of rela- tionship practices we have ultimately been able both to retain our conceptual focus and to use this quantitative dimension of the study to establish questions whereby to inter- rogate the smaller-scale qualitative dataset. Using free-text open questions in the survey, participants were asked to tell us what they liked and disliked about their relationship and what their partner did that made them feel appreciated. These questions generated over 10,000 responses with answers ranging from several words to lengthy descriptions. The process of quantifying these qualitative data was a daunting task but they were all ultimately coded using grounded theory. In this way we organized the many emerging ideas and themes into clusters of answers; these informed the extended coding frame being developed for use with our qualitative data. As a consequence of this labour-intensive and time-consuming process, we are now able to complete mixed methods analysis across the study’s quantitative and qualitative data- sets. Here, however, we will focus on the responses to just one of the free-text open questions: ‘Identify two things that your partner does for you that make you feel appreci- ated’. We use these data both to interrogate the patterning of relationship experience and to demonstrate why a quantitative survey can be a valuable instrument in studying eve- ryday practices. For example, through our analyses of the data we move beyond satisfac- tion ratings and/or statistical prevalence of behaviour to reveal the ordinariness of things that are seen as relationship practices and the factors which count in shaping couples’ experiences. Survey responses to the query ‘Identify two things that your partner does for you that make you feel appreciated’ illustrate the range of ‘things’ that were included by respond- ents, ranging from verbal expressions of gratitude to sexual intimacy; the latter of which being perhaps the most unexpected dimension to feature as an expression of apprecia- tion. Here we draw attention to the prevalence, meanings and importance afforded to everyday relationship practices. Surprise gifts, thoughtful gestures and the kindness of a cup of tea in bed were all valued highly. Disaggregating these into separate categories (see Figure 1) reveals the nature and practices of the gestures being referred to. When combined, however, they comprise the most popular category for women, with 22\% of mothers and 20\% of childless women ranking everyday attentive acts as one of their two things which make them feel appreciated. Typical sentiments expressed in these responses included: Warms my car up in the morning. Picking a bunch of wild flowers and putting them in a vase for me. Quantitative data from the Enduring Love? study indicate that the ‘success’ of a relation- ship for our participants was not dependent on money, the external validation afforded through socio-cultural external markers such as extravagant bouquets of flowers which by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ 976 Sociology 49(5) profess to display love, or the approbation of extended kin. It was intimate couple knowl- edge, and its manifestation through everyday acts, that counted: Gives me time to myself when he knows I’m jaded. Shares private smiles when we are out. Domestic roles and responsibilities rested alongside a sense of commitment and togeth- erness. Relationship practices and relationship generosity were meaningful because they demonstrated how both the relationship and the other partner were cherished. There is, then, an acknowledgement and valuing of the everyday practices and emotions that go into sustaining relationships over time (Gabb et al., 2013). Such endeavours were appre- ciated as relationship ‘gifts’ (Hochschild, 2003); acts of reciprocity that bound the couple together through give and take. The characterization of and importance afforded to everyday gestures in the survey, and to the way these gestures were recurring features in often brief interactions between couples, thus ensured our sensitivity and attentiveness to the momentary as a defining quality of relationship practices. In the qualitative dataset, through our multi-sensory research design, we began therefore to more fully explore the significance of momentari- ness: how moments both shape everyday embodied lives and facilitate analytical explor- ation of the ways in which participants’ emotional–social worlds intersect. 0\% 2\% 4\% 6\% 8\% 10\% 12\% 14\% 16\% MOTHERS CHILDLESS WOMEN FATHERS CHILDLESS MEN Figure 1. Identify two things that your partner does for you that make you feel appreciated. by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ Gabb and Fink 977 Multiple Methods in Multi-sensory Qualitative Research Design While interviews often remain the default qualitative technique, creative qualitative methods have been developed and widely deployed in research with children and/or cross-generational and family studies (for discussion, see Gabb, 2008). For example in participatory research with children and young people, visual methodologies are fre- quently used to explore ideas of childhood which extend beyond the range and scope of the purely logocentric, and through which participants can narrate their own experiences and perspectives (Holland et al., 2010; Lomax et al., 2011). Visual methods are also drawn upon to extend understandings of the ways in which social inequalities shape the everyday experiences of communities, families and individuals (Fink and Lomax, 2012). In therapeutic contexts, systemic psychotherapists use a variety of nonverbal methods in their work with children and families (Wilson, 2007) including participatory action methods (Chimera, 2013). The graphic emotion map technique pioneered by Gabb in her research on family relationships (Gabb, 2008) has now also been extended for use in clinical contexts (Gabb and Singh, 2014a, 2014b). The evident usefulness of visual and embodied qualitative methods in these different research, participatory and therapeutic contexts reinforces our argument, therefore, that a qualitative multiple methods approach is vital in research on couple relationships and personal lives. More particularly, through a multi-sensory multiple methods research design, richly textured data are generated which can focus on different dimensions of phenomena (Gabb, 2008). This layering approach has been variously described as pieces of a jigsaw (Gabb, 2009) or fragments of data which produce meaning through ‘each twist of the analytical kaleidoscope’ (McCarthy et al., 2003: 19). Mason (2011) has argued that fac- ets (data from different methods) cast and refract light to afford ‘flashes of insight’ on a phenomenon (the multi-faceted gemstone). For us, however, there is no single gemstone. Relationships are highly complex phenomena in that the object of study is often hard to grasp, not least because it includes the individual, the couple, the social unit, as well as the biographical contexts of their lives and loves, and so on and so forth. The analytical foci can be difficult to sustain and, by default, are constantly evolving. Our approach, therefore, uses different methods to bring into sharp relief the range of everyday ordinary moments that, when combined, build up dynamic and multidimensional understandings of the couple relationship. Strands of data within these moments maintain individual integrity but they do not weave a seamless picture. It is the subtle interplay of cross- cutting threads that brings to the surface and works to retain the emotional complexity of lives lived in and through the everyday and in the context of wider social relations. To analyse the qualitative data we deployed a process of thematic coding which has its roots in grounded theory (Charmaz, 2005; Miles and Huberman, 1983). Through reading and re-reading materials, structuring theoretical and experiential themes were identified and these were organized into clusters which resulted in the development of a 27-item coding frame. This thematic frame was then further broken down to identify dif- ferent dimensions within these broad clusters. For example within the ‘tree node’ child- care there were ‘free nodes’ for child/family-centred, absence/presence of children, age/ maturity and family planning.2 Given the sheer volume and complexity of data, the by guest on November 14, 2015soc.sagepub.comDownloaded from http://soc.sagepub.com/ 978 Sociology 49(5) design and implementation of the coding frame was extremely time consuming. The reason that we invested so heavily in this labour-intensive process was to gain familiarity with the data, to ensure that the coding frame captured the richness and breadth of the data, and so we could systematically analyse the data through different analytical vectors – as couple cases, individual accounts, and via cross-sectional themes and attributes. It is commonplace when using data management software to include a ‘gold dust’ code through which ‘juicy’ quotes can be identified. These are often used to lead early analysis. Our reticence at having this free-floating code was that when faced with an overwhelming volume of data it can serve to close down analysis, providing a shortcut to findings that obscures the complexity of the dataset. Gold dust can all too easily become sound bites which illustrate headline-grabbing claims, undermining otherwise nuanced multidimensional close analysis. We wanted both to avoid these analytical traps and to retain our focus on the everyday and momentary that had been so crucially high- lighted in the project’s survey data. After all thematic coding had been completed we therefore worked into the coded dataset again to identify moments. These moments ranged from one line to several pages in length and featured in different forms in data from all the different methods. Recognizing what constitutes ‘a moment’ was considered at length by the research team. It could be an apparently inconsequential activity in the course of an average day, a particular interaction between the couple or a response to an outside stimulus such as a TV programme. Whereas Giddens (1991) identifies the epiphanal as the identifiable mark of the fateful moment, our ‘revelatory moments’ (Trigger et al., 2012) were recognized by the researcher because they were intimately revealing. They were emotional scenarios which revealed something about the ways in which couples related to and interacted with each other, while also showing how those dynamics intersected with wider social relations, such as masculinity and femininity (Burkitt, 2014). In the remainder of this article, therefore, we concentrate on two such moments, drawing on the data from two couples: Sumaira and her partner and Hayley and her partner. By paying attention to the particularities of storytelling and visual tropes deployed in Sumaira’s diary and the tensions and ambivalences in Hayley’s diary we can see how these methodological and epistemological features combine to portray particular kinds of relationship stories. In so doing we advance understanding of both these couple relationships and the ways in which biography, experience and socio- cultural contexts intersect, thereby exemplifying the value of a moments approach in the analysis of qualitative methods data. What a Feeling: Adventures and Adversities Diaries are a particularly useful method in studying personal relationships because they serve, in some ways, as a ‘confessional’ device …