Methodological Approaches and Family Research Methods

Abstract

In chapter 2 I touched on some of the debates in family and childhood studies around methodology and the pragmatics of researching personal life and relationality. In this chapter I fill in some of the detail, focusing on research approaches that have informed and shaped these fields. In qualitative studies of family life a phenomenological or ethnomethodological approach is typical, in which theorising emerges from the data. Social phenomenologists are concerned with the experiential underpinnings of knowledge and ethnomethodologists focus on everyday practices and mechanisms that constitute and maintain social formations such as the family (Holstein and Gubrium 2005). Most of the research detailed in this chapter, broadly speaking, falls within these grounded perspectives. However, I do not focus on the epistemological standpoint so much as the different methodological approaches used in the study of family life.