Researching children in multi-local, post-separation families through the lenses of space and ICT
(2018) European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry — Location: Leuven (6.February.2018)
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- Abstract
- In this paper I will present the methodological design of the ERC Starting Grant project “MobileKids: Children in multi-local, post-separation families”. The major goal of this project is to understand how children’s socialisation is shaped by the experience of shared physical custody arrangements in post-divorce families, through the children’s own accounts of their lives. This means determining how, and under what circumstances, children appropriate their multi-local family lives and develop new forms of habitus that incorporate mobility, virtual connectedness and the capacity to appropriate them and act upon them. This project focuses in particular on the experience of children aged between 10 and 13 at the beginning of the study and who are living in egalitarian shared custody arrangements in Belgium, in France and in Italy. The micro-level of ‘children’s lives’ represents the core of this study, and consists in examining how children maintain their social and family relationships as they move with various temporalities between two households that are located in specific administrative territories and spatial entities. In line with the sociology of childhood (James and Prout, 1997) we recognize that children are active social actors that can, to various extents, exercise agency and influence on their own lives as well as on the lives of the people surrounding them, while being constrained by institutions. Our analysis focuses more specifically on [1] how they try to maintain their social and family relations, [2] what role they play in the everyday organization of their multi-local lives and negotiate the various aspects of these lives with their relatives and significant others, and [3] what strategies they put in place to control, resist, limit their mobility. This also involves analysing [4] how children appropriate the spaces where they live, and [5] how they make use of, and appropriate communication technologies to maintain their family and social relationships. Studying children’s lived experience of multilocality means unravelling the complex interconnections between geographical mobility between two households located in different material, social, cultural and/or political ‘territories’ (di Méo, 2014) within national borders, and virtual mobility and modes of connectedness via the use of ICT. The in-depth study with children, which started in September 2017, is based on a qualitative, multi-methods design that is mainly composed of a series of narrative interviews based on a range of creative, flexible activities (Weller, 2012) inspired by methods developed in sociology, social geography and psychology (such as socio-spatial network games (Schier et al., 2015), emotion maps based on household sticker charts (Gabb, 2009), auto-photography (Ziller, 1990) and digital stories (Hull and Katz, 2006)). These methods provide concrete material to stimulate the discussions, and produce specific data on children’s subjectivities. In this presentation, I will in particular discuss the challenges and opportunities of engaging in this cumulative process of data collection with children.
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Merla, L. (2018). Researching children in multi-local, post-separation families through the lenses of space and ICT. European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/125123