Applying the ‘Experience-Near’ Principle To Research: Psychoanalytically Informed Methods1

¹ This article is based on a talk given at the second meeting, on 12 June 2007, of the ESRC seminar series entitled ‘Practitioner Research and Practice-near Methods’. The topic was the use of the infant observation method and its application and potential for social work. The talk was originally entitled ‘The potential of the observation method’.

Abstract

This article is about how to preserve the vitality of the meaning conveyed to social science researchers by participants. I use the example of a qualitative, psycho-social project on the topic of how women's identities change when they become mothers for the first time. Psychoanalysis was used and adapted to understand both participants' and researchers' experience, and the relation of these to each other. I describe two psychoanalytically informed research methods, free association narrative interviewing and infant observation, and give examples of how, separately and together they can go beyond a text-based method and conceptualise identities in ways that avoid reproducing assumptions of rational, unitary, discursive subjectivity. In assessing how well the two methods worked, I focus my discussion on the observation method using four themes: dimensions of time, embodiment and practices, spatial sensitivity and multiple positioning, and how knowing is accomplished in research.

Keywords:

• experience-near
• psycho-social research
• psychoanalytically informed methods
• objectivity
• pace
• intergenerational identification
• embodied affect

Notes

¹ This article is based on a talk given at the second meeting, on 12 June 2007, of the ESRC seminar series entitled ‘Practitioner Research and Practice-near Methods’. The topic was the use of the infant observation method and its application and potential for social work. The talk was originally entitled ‘The potential of the observation method’.

² Rachel Thomson, a sociologist, has come to similar conclusions from the perspective of working in research teams concerned to recognise the importance of time, process and change in individuals (2007, p. 571) and the need for methods that ‘represent a psychologically complex, mobile and embodied subject’ (2010, p. 2 draft).

³ Carol Gilligan's work is based on the proposition that ‘voice’ conveys a lot more than sound: ‘by voice I mean something like the core of the self. Voice is natural and also cultural. It is composed of breath and sound, words, rhythm, and language. And voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds’ (Gilligan, 1993, p. xvi).

⁴ Our three-year project ‘Identities in Process: Becoming African, Caribbean, Bangladeshi and White Mothers in Tower Hamlets’ was funded by The Economic and Social Research Council (grant number 148-25-0058), the government funder of social science research in the UK. The research team consisted of Wendy Hollway, Ann Phoenix, Heather Elliott, Cathy Urwin and Yasmin Gunaratnam. Dr Cathy Urwin led the observation side of the project and conducted the weekly observation seminars attended by members of the research team. She edited a special journal issue on the observation cases (Urwin, 2007).

⁵ This is parallel to clinical supervision, which is securely established in psychoanalytic practice. A variant of it used to be a common feature of social work practice.

⁶ These topics form much of my current writing, enabled by an ESRC Research Fellowship (grant number 06-27-0118) entitled ‘Maternal Identities, Care and Intersubjectivity’, which uses the data from the ‘Becoming a Mother’ project to develop ontological, methodological and epistemological implications of a psycho-social research paradigm (Hollway, in preparation). In this section, therefore, I confine the topics to an illustrative few and refer to other relevant writings.

⁷ Working faster can mean less, not more, understanding: a further lesson in the importance of pace!