ABSTRACT

Drawing on participant-generated photo-elicitation in telephone interviews conducted with private tenants in Britain, we contribute to a new strand of home literature that engages with the vibrant materiality of things. In particular, the paper reflects on how our innovative methodological approach empowered participants to introduce their own points of view through ‘thick’ descriptions, revealed previously undocumented home practices and enabled researchers’ reflexivity and the co-production of knowledge with participants located miles away. The method powerfully captures home’s tangible and intangible materialities and their importance to wellbeing in ways that words-alone interviews cannot. We conclude by introducing the metaphor of ‘the fold’ and the allegory of ‘the invisible tether’ to reflect on the methodological benefits and substantive findings enabled by our approach. We argue that housing studies can benefit from engaging photo-elicitation in questions spanning from the abstract to the concrete, and from the inside to the outside of the home.

摘要

借助参与者在与英国私人租户进行的电话采访中产生的照片诱因，我们为家庭文学的新领域做出了贡献，使事物充满生机。特别是，该论文反映了我们创新的方法论方法如何使参与者能够通过“厚实的”描述来介绍自己的观点，揭示以前未记录的家庭实践，以及使研究人员具有自反性，并且可以与远方的参与者共同生产知识。该方法可以有效地捕捉家庭的有形和无形的物质，以及它们对幸福感的重要性，而这种方法只能靠文字进行的访谈无法实现。最后，我们通过介绍“褶皱”的隐喻和“看不见的系绳”的寓言来反思我们的方法所带来的方法学优势和实质性发现。我们认为，房屋研究可以通过激发光敏性而受益，这些问题涉及从抽象到具体以及从房屋的内部到外部的问题。