Qualitative longitudinal research in family sociology

Abstract

The combination of qualitative interpretative approaches and longitudinal research designs, although not new in the social sciences, is gaining increasing recognition as a useful and even necessary avenue to explore family changes as they occur. Qualitative methods, whether longitudinal or not, emphasise the understanding of meanings, subjective experience, and agency. The use of such methods can improve our comprehension of how people choose a given alternative and reject another, and how they adjust or fail to adjust to their living circumstances. At the core of qualitative investigation is also an interest in understanding the meaning of the experiences of social actors in their social contexts. In family research, numerous one-off studies have investigated how different individuals and groups create, interpret, and negotiate family relationships, roles, and transitions. The longitudinal approach adds to this tradition by focusing on the course of events, as well as on the processes of change, stability, and continuity through time. At the individual level, the combination of qualitative and longitudinal research enables us to capture how individuals create meanings about the turns of their lives and their circumstances as they unfold. For instance, it is indispensable to investigate how processes like those initiated by a chronic disease, a union dissolution, or the experience of social discrimination unfold from specific socio-cultural and biographic perspectives. While one-off qualitative approaches are widely used in family sociology and have often collected retrospective information, until recently, longitudinal prospective methods were more popular in quantitative studies. 1 They are generally used to describe and measure the objective aspects of change, such as personal and social trajectories, like family relations and biographic events associated with educational, employment, and residential careers. While quantification assesses the regularities and the probability of the occurrence of social dynamics, such data are thin when it comes to accounting for the logic of the actions that underlie them. In contrast, by investigating agency and meanings, qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has the potential to unravel the complexity of changes that are involved in the making and the unmaking of family relationships across the life course. This will not come as a surprise if we think of both agency and meanings as dynamic objects of study: individual agency co-produces the processes through which individuals live and, therefore, their experiences of change. Subjective meanings are shaped by social interactions, and shift in relation to life course events and transitions.QLR has started accumulating rich data on relational practices and multidimensional experiences of family and childhood across the life course, with change and temporality being central to their interpretation. Change can be conceived and qualitatively analysed at levels beyond just that of the individual, including at the couple, group, i...

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