Searching for accessible examples of creative analysis

In the ‘Creativity in Research’ webinar we delivered in 2021, we presented examples of our own creative research methods. We spoke about the ways in which we had found, unearthed, and stumbled towards or across approaches to doing data analysis creatively within the context of particular projects. Although we knew that many researchers were already doing data analysis creatively, we saw that some people were struggling for permission to do things differently as well as seeking to find formal writing on the subject. We were struck by a realisation that many were looking for usable examples of doing data analysis differently; for practical resources that they could pick up and apply; and for texts that could describe, simply, how creative approaches have been undertaken and to what effect epistemologically, methodologically, and substantively.

This search for formal writing on the subject reflects an appetite for learning from others and we are confident that creative methods of analysis will become central to new developments in research in the coming years, not least because the move towards transdisciplinary research requires the kinds of development, adaptation, and mixing of methods found in this book. The idea of being engaged in a search also captures something of our intent as editors of this collection. We recognise that we need this handbook as surely as those who attended the webinar and many of those who have contributed chapters have told us that they need this handbook too.

One directive we gave to all authors in preparing their chapters was to outline a case example of a method of analysis in enough detail for another researcher to be able to use their approach. The authors all made serious attempts to deliver on this request and each chapter provides some form of ‘map’ of the journey taken. Ingold (2011, p 204) argues that maps are often more useful in ‘revealing the inner reality of the world’ than providing some coherent view of its ‘outer surface’. We believe that that the chapters in this collection do both and we see how researchers have had to struggle to find an approach that they can live with themselves, but which will also be seen as acceptable in their institutional and disciplinary context.

Moving beyond the mystery and magic of data analysis

All research projects require a research design, phases of data collection or data production, and careful processes of analysis that lead to the dissemination of key findings. The activities of analysis have been defined as a process of attention, reflective systematic inquiry, and exploration.

Given its central importance, there could be an assumption that the nuts and bolts of analytical procedures are clear to researchers, and that they are well aware of the steps required to move beyond the mass of data accumulated in a study to the distillation and refinement of key points that attend to research aims and central questions. However, data analysis has been positioned as ‘the most complex and mysterious of all of the phases’ of research and ‘one that receives the least thoughtful discussion in the literature’ (Thorne, 2000, p 69). This impression of mystery and mystical journeys is sustained in the reporting of research studies that only offer a glimpse of the concrete steps of the analytical process.

This mysterious phenomenon, and the lack of insight into the processes by which conceptual leaps that generate abstract theoretical ideas from empirical data, have also been noted by other scholars who call for ‘greater openness and legitimacy for reflexive accounts’ of the ‘how’ of data analysis (Klag and Langley, 2013, p 149).

Introduction

The distinctiveness of Wales in terms of its political life and culture has grown considerably since the early 2000s (Mackay, 2010). Nevertheless, beneath the imagery of the definitive nation, Wales remains a complex and divided land in which a marginalised and demonised working class has come to characterise areas of Wales dominated by poverty and social exclusion. Such polarisation has a spatial dimension that is illustrated in the creation of new ghettos of prosperity and poverty that now dominate the Welsh socioeconomic terrain, and this ‘stigma of place’ permeates the identities of residents. The chapter begins by considering how moral panics about particular places create ‘spatial folk devils’. The creation of moral panics through political discourses and mediated forms is then explored in terms of contemporary representations. Drawing on research with mothers and their daughters in a marginalised Welsh locale, the chapter examines the ideology of unity alongside the divisions of everyday life, and the ways in which respectable and acceptable working-class femininities are negotiated against a pervasive discourse of lack, stigma and classed moral panics.

Moral panics and folk devils: contemporary Representations

As Cohen (1980, p 9) contends, societies are subject to periods of moral panic in which ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values’. Moral panics are often discussed in relation to group criminality, incivility and disorder. However, arguably, the emphasis on collective behaviour has shifted to that of the morality of deficient individuals who require discipline; and these deficiencies are seen as a product of personal choice, where individuals are authors of their own immorality (Burney, 2005). Moral panics are often associated with the sociology of deviance, focusing on ‘delinquency, youth cultures, subcultures and style, vandalism, drugs and football hooliganism’ (Cohen, 2011, p vi). Nevertheless, the concept of morality also relates to wider discourses about appropriate ways of being that move beyond criminal behaviour and acts of resistance, to encompass socially constructed ideologies that form part of the invisible social order.

The nineteenth century was characterised by moral panics about the ignorance, ineptness and filthiness of working-class women (Delamont, 1978; Aaron et al, 1994; Beddoe, 2000) who were ‘defined as a threat to societal values’ (Cohen, 1980, p 9).