Creative and qualitative methods

Creative ways of researching everyday life, in all its multidimensionality

Everyday lives combine the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the exceptional. This complexity poses challenges for how to do research but also possibilities as we try to develop methods that help us to be attuned to the spoken, unspoken, multi-sensory, material, digital and atmospheric.

In the Morgan Centre, we tend to adopt qualitatively-driven methods, through thoughtful use of established methods such as ethnography, semi-structured interviewing, and surveys. We also adopt creative approaches to research, such as through the adaptation of these more established methods – for example we do interviews creatively (for example, through object or visual elicitations).

We also adopt explicitly creative methods, such as sketching and creative writing; for example, Andy Balmer’s ‘painting with data’ approach to working with data, and Sue Heath’s collaboration with sketch artist Lynne Chapman. Taken together, these inventive approaches engage the senses and the imaginations of our research participants, and us as researchers, and this helps us explore often hitherto hidden layers of everyday life and relationships.

We have developed a number of inventive approaches in the Morgan Centre, such as ‘Facet Methodology’ (Jennifer Mason, 2011) that centres the curiosity of researchers to think creatively about different facets of a research question. The Morgan Centre has also been the home of other creative innovations in methods, such as Material Methods (Sophie Woodward, 2019) and Mundane Methods (Helen Holmes and Sarah Marie Hall, 2020) and creative ways of working with qualitative data ‘Everyday Qualitative Analysis (Sophie Woodward, Andrew Balmer, James Fletcher, James Hodgson and Jessica Mancuso, 2027).