Out of the ordinary: research participants’ experiences of sharing the ‘insignificant’

ABSTRACT

How do research participants feel about having their ‘ordinary’ lives researched? This article focuses on how research participants manage the sharing of details emerging out of their ordinary lives in the context of research – an activity which, for most, is outside of the ordinary. Despite two significant research turns – towards reflexivity and towards the ‘everyday’ – these experiences remain curiously neglected. Drawing on a study of small acts of help and support, I seek to push methodological debate about researching the ordinary beyond the technical challenges of surfacing or capturing the apparently mundane or ‘insignificant’. I do so by arguing that background feelings rooted in the living of, and sharing about, the ordinary are analytically important in their own right; that the ‘ordinary’ itself, therefore, has to be managed by research participants and researchers; and that Goffman’s notion of performance is a useful tool for understanding how this is done.

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday
• ordinary
• mundane
• ambivalence
• logs
• emotions

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for funding the Liveable Lives Study, all the participants that took part and the following members of the research team at Edinburgh University, ScotCen Social Research and NatCen Social Research: Simon Anderson, E‐J Milne, Jo Neary, Martin Mitchell, Anna Marcinkiewicz and Susan Reid. Thank you also to Niamh Moore, Isabelle Darmon, Sophia Woodman and Graham Crow for careful reading and feedback on earlier versions of this paper and to Irene Anderson for proof reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A special journal edition on the everyday (Sociology, 2015), offered a rich engagement with the subject; all but two of the articles described qualitative research on the everyday, yet none explored research participants’ experiences of having their everyday lives explored.

2. This is also the focus of many of the articles in (i).

3. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

4. Including 6 focus groups (one naturally occurring and one structured through household recruitment in each of the areas).

5. These were recruited through a variety of approaches, including household screening and networking to achieve maximum diversity based on gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic class and disability. The use of logs with such a diverse sample, rather than a particular group (Bartlett & Milligan, 2015) is unusual and allowed non group-specific responses to be identified. Overall, the sample was approximately balanced in gender terms and was spread across the following age categories: 18–29; 30–39; 40–49, 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and 80–89.

6. These 12 interviews were not carried out by the researcher who did the face-to-face interviews and were sampled to reflect the diversity of the wider group.

7. Three participants did not complete the log: two due to ill health and one because they lost the camera.

8. This discussion could be read as concerning different techniques to deliver one method – log keeping. As visual logs can be thought of as a distinct method, however, reference is made to both techniques and methods.

9. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Brownlie

Julie Brownlie is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of emotions and relationships.