1. Scaling up of QLR: Methodological & Ethical Challenges
NCRM Presentation, 30th June, 2008
Karen Henwood, Cardiff School of Social Sciences

2. Methodological advance : A key aim of Timescapes Network
To be achieved by the scaling up of qualitative & QLL enquiry through the integration of the projects into a major study combining rich, situated inquiry with extensive temporal and spatial coverage
Highly reliant on collaborative working, with data pooling & sharing at its heart: collaboration within network also a key methodological strategy, resource & issue
Two of the reasons for considering Timescapes as a major study (along with the significance investment ESRC has made in us!), is that it combining rich, situated inquiry with extensive temporal and spatial coverage. We describe our study as involving rich, situated inquiry because, as well as collecting primary data in the form of
many sweeps waves of in depth interviews
continuous data collection by walking alongside people to make ethnographic observations or doing day in the life shadowing and tracking people over time,

3. In situ mechanisms for scaling up QLL inquiry
Timescapes’ common conceptual, fieldwork & methodological questions
Collection baseline data
Data sharing and working data archive ultimately for use beyond Timescapes team
Collaborative working involving secondary analysis across 7 empirical projects
JISC list to promote QLL methods & build capacity
Workshops and forums with researchers, QLL specialists, and policy makers
NB Membership of UK National Strategy for Longitudinal Studies (Holland & Neale)

4. Through collectively addressing network’s core conceptual & methodological questions
What are the practical & ethical requirements for a large-scale qualitative longitudinal study?
What are the possibilities and challenges for data sharing and archiving in a major qualitative longitudinal study?
How can mixing qualitative and quantitative methods contribute to the development of qualitative longitudinal research, and enhance its role in longitudinal social science?
What are the possibilities & challenges of scaling up qualitative & QLL research?

5. What are the key methodological challenges?
Questions of study design: methodology/methods for tracking individuals and/or intergenerational groups over time; how many waves of contact? how frequently? ways of addressing problems of attrition?
How to empirically harness key timescapes concept (multiple vantage points for looking in & across time) for studying dynamic process occurring in & through time?
Contextualising QLL personal data to make available continuities & changes in historical, social, cultural time
Metadata (or contextual data that must be attached to core interview data for its significance and meanings to be understood and interpreted) and contextual knowledge (in the broader sense of all materials providing insights into the substantive, theoretical, and methodological concerns relevant to a study) play a vital role in QLL research as in qualitative research more generally.
Timescapes’ projects are collecting a wide range of contextualising so that they can bring into view the historical and cultural circumstances of people who are living out their lives in specific space-time locations.
Some projects (Bren’s young lives project) is building a cultural inventory around each person’s life;
other projects are tracking changes in the policy landscape
; others are using visual and multi-media to bring into view the more contextual aspects of people’s lives.

6. Methodological issues arising
Logistical: differential timings of core research activities between projects
Reflexivity as part of process or built into contextualisation of data for archiving?
Building confidence in segmentation & levels of access to protect sensitive data

7. QLR Ethics: consensus
Situated ethics; e.g. consent not a single act but a process involving ongoing negotiation
Awareness but not hyper-vigilance about such risks; assisted by regular "round table" discussions
Collaborative development of data pooling, management & archiving; including conditions for sharing & accessing data
Archiving as part of a live study; different levels of access and control to protect sensitive data & facilitate secondary analysis

8. Ethical challenges
Anonymisation; participants’ preferences; balancing with contextualisation; when to begin and what to anonymise?
Ensuring long-term use of data; foresight about attrition; no retrospective withdrawal of consent once given
Variability of participant involvement; partnership approach or minimisation to avoid interruption/intrusion
Ensuring transfer of knowledge between researchers of sensitive information (e.g. still birth/death of child)
Visual & multimedia; incorporate lessons from QUADS projects

9. Developments in QLL methodology: (recognised, ongoing)
Narrative - contemporaneous, retrospective and prospective accounts; sense-making in & through time
Micro-level temporal processes as the intricate, dynamic flow of meanings that are constitutive of experience : “microtemporalities” through which identities & relationships come to be configured in and through multiplicities of time
Personal & cultural narratives of life & change; link biography with broader trajectories, focus on questions of generational transfer/transmission, dynamics of socio-cultural change, history in the making
Psychosocial theory & methods: for overcoming micro-macro, personal-social divides?
The Timescapes study is inclusive, also, of further developments in QLL methodology. Some projects are taking forward their interest in narrative QLL where data collection takes the form of contemporaneous, retrospective and prospective accounts, and analysis of these makes it possible to investigate people’s sense-making in & through time. At the forefront here is the dynamics of modern motherhood study.
Some studies are informed by some of the principles of psychosocial QLL which is concerned to find ways of overcoming disciplinary divisions in ways of thinking and inquiring about the psychic and the social, the macro and the micro, the personal and the social. The psychosocial is the term used to refer to the space that is neither one nor the other, nor both, but where there is a flow of intricate relations between them. Conducting temporal study of these flows is the concern of my own ‘men as fathers ’project: in one line of analysis (that will go one to illustrate with some data) we have looked into the fluctuating ways in which men construct their imaginary identifications as motherly and virtuous fathers- according great significance to the ways in which they negotiate tensions between them at different time points.
Another, related, source of methodological development within QLL is the study of extended personal and cultural narratives of life and change; how these two narrative forms cross cut or connect with one another may be one way to link in the close study of biographical data into analyses of broader social and cultural themes, trends & trajectories. We have started to do this in the men as fathers project, using our men’s accounts of continuity and change in their own biographies to interrogate contradictory cultural narratives that speak, on the one hand, of quite dramatic change and, on the other of little meaningful or practical change in the way men approach being fathers today. More generally, one of the external consultants to the network, Professor Corinne Squire (CNR), will be scoping out the possibility of using the Timescapes data set to investigate how a focus on cultural narratives and life stories can be used in the analysis of temporalities and lifecourse study.

10. PROJECT EXAMPLE Micro-temporalities through the visual (Cardiff) Men as Fathers study
Exploring the complexities of temporality and change through photo-elicitation method.
Using a sequence of visual images representing a cultural narrative; from ‘Victorian’ to ‘modern’ father.
Getting to the temporal dynamics of paternal identities, masculinities & relationships as they move through historical and socio-cultural time and are contextualised within it.
“an assemblage of images in sequential, narrative form used as a framing device in visual mode”

11. Data on micro-temporal processes Kevin’s extracts as example
IMAGE 1
Kevin: And I wouldn’t like my family photos to be like that. You know, standing next to each other or whatever, I (2) that’s weird.
IMAGE 2
Kevin: (sigh) Again to me it all seems quite false. Um (2) you know, you don’t have to say ‘I love you’ all the time and that nonsense, there’s no need to have the public displays of affection. They’re fine if you want them, if they’re naturally on the spur of the moment, but (3) you’ve got to want to do them rather than feel you have to and, you know, that’s more of a formulated plan isn’t it?

12. Data on micro-temporal processes
‘MODERN’ FATHER IMAGES
Kevin: My take on it now (3) not being a father, and in some way the earlier photos are far better because there’s structure, there’s (3) more (3) there was more of a niceness about some of it, you know, more gentlemanly. But now there’s no (2) day-to-day. And I’ve only started noticing it more definitely since I found out I’m going to be a father, is how people interact with their children, and I’m finding a lot of it appalling that (2), you know, swearing in front of children and (4) screaming and arguing with their wives.

13. What about the micro-temporalities?
Men identifying with, re-configuring and resisting the historical and socio-cultural flow in ‘progressive’ visual representations of paternal identity and masculinity
Progressive temporality: past outdated, time moving on and evolving
Circular temporality: Fragments of the past/historical themes as ‘living relics’, the ‘now’ as contrived
Men as fathers constituting themselves in and against these contradictory and interwoven temporalities
Men’s engagement with the micro-temporal through the visual cuing us into the bigger QLL picture (their engagements with history, time & change, their meanings & negotiations of time and change)

14. Concluding remarks
QLL = sustained intensive investigation of lives in real time as they unfold;
- varied ways of putting principles in practice using QLL method
‘Men as fathers’ project example:
- sequential narrative in visual mode; a “timescape” for discerning microtemporal process & capturing dynamic complexities of change in the making
- self constitution as identification with & reconfiguration of socio-cultural flow
- temporalities as progressive and circular
- cue to larger policy questions : paternal identities & the long term resourcing of families?
What does the future hold? ‘Scaling up’ though integration of collective developments network-wide to develop & showcase QLL methods