DISCUSIÓN DE RESULTADOS

It has been suggested that talking about the biographies of things is a way of understanding the discourses, memories and futures that are caught up in and surround them (see section 2.5). My aim, therefore, in talking with participants about their stored possessions was to develop an understanding of the nature of their relationship with them, but also the significance of their placement in storage, and the role they had in their lives more broadly. Object-elicitation is a natural addition to interviews since it simply involves inserting objects into the research interview, yet it can prompt the expression of ideas and experiences which interviews alone may not be able to uncover.

In this section I provide an overview of the two qualitative research methods employed in the fieldwork for this project.

3.2.1 Interviews

Interviews offer focused ways in which to gain verbal accounts, narratives and reflexive understandings of participants’ everyday lives and worlds. As such they are one of the key qualitative methods used in ethnographic research of material culture and the home (Marcoux 2001b; Hurdley 2006; Gregson et al. 2007b; Woodward 2007; Gregson et al.

2009). Interviews, as a kind of ‘conversation’ that can reveal what cannot otherwise be perceived (emotions, meaning etc.), have the potential to unpack the subjectivities implicated in human interaction with material things. The reflective space of the interview encounter can be particularly conducive to exploring the taken-for-granted and

not-readily-articulated (Johnson 2002), such as the meaning associated with routine material practices (i.e. caring, sorting, placing, ridding and storing).

The aim of the interviews was to understand how people experience and make sense of their own lives (Valentine 1997, p. 111) through self-storage. Following Eyles and Smith (1988) the interviews were designed as ‘conversation with a purpose’. A semi-structured interview format was chosen because it is discursive “letting respondents develop their answers in their own terms and at their own length and depth” (Fielding and Thomas 2008, p. 255). I had an interview guide with me which I referred to occasionally to make sure specific themes I was interested in were covered (Miller and Glass 2004), but otherwise allowed the participant to guide the interview. Encouraging informal dialogue in this way allowed participants to raise issues that may not have been anticipated. As a result, the material generated from the interviews is rich, detailed and multi-layered.

Fielding and Thomas (2008, p. 249) identify that whilst the objective is that discussion should be as frank as possible, it can be impeded in several ways. Respondents may attempt to rationalise their actions, withholding evaluative or emotional reasons for them that would give a truer insight. They may also steer away from revealing anything that might embarrass them, avoiding describing aspects of behaviour or attitudes that do not maintain the self-image they prefer to portray. However, most of the participants seemed to be unconcerned with labelling their stuff as junk or themselves as hoarders (see section 4.2). Thus interviews reveal how the narration and making sense of everyday events perpetuate the practices and ideas that constitute them. Inevitably though, there were topics that I anticipated would be difficult to explore using only verbal means, predominantly those which had been forgotten or deemed to be unimportant. It was for these topics in particular that the incorporation of additional stimuli – the stored objects themselves – presented a means of eliciting closer reflection from the participants.

3.2.2 Object-elicitation

Research from theoretical perspectives acknowledges the importance of things in framing everyday experiences (see Chapter 2) and these approaches raise methodological questions about how the non-verbal, tacit and material properties of things can be researched. Matter can act as ‘evidence’, “enriched by contingencies, absences, imaginings and re-awakenings of geographies of the past, present and future”

(Tolia-Kelly 2009, p. 504). Participant-observation has traditionally been one of the main approaches in anthropological studies of material culture (see Miller 1987). The exploration of material practices as ‘interactive and embodied’ has been developed through visual methods such as photography (Daniels 2010) and video (Dant 2010;

Hockey et al. 2013), as well as sensory methodologies (Pink 2009). However visual methods, as well as capturing material practices, can also provoke responses. Notably,

photo-elicitation has been utilised to explore the material culture of family photographs (Rowsell 2011) and mantelpieces (Hurdley 2006). Object-elicitation methods have been adopted across the social sciences as a route into people’s narratives and memories (see Hoskins 1998), which are not always accessible in other ways (Hurdley 2006).

Object-elicitation methods have taken a number of different forms but generally involve the integration of material culture with a word-based approach. Ian Woodward (2001) has noted the utility of ‘talking with’ objects when attempting to express complex ideas about the human relationship with the material world, particularly the ways in which objects are valued (or not). His research highlights the need to interrogate the relationship between what participants’ say and what they do with things. The place of objects in the interview scenario is something Sophie Woodward has investigated during her study of old denim jeans, trying out life history interviews about jeans and objects interviews with jeans to explore “how people ‘speak’ the material” (2016, p. 359). She found that material memories were relatively sparse in the life history interviews, and were more often about clothing disasters than routine material relationships, which were harder to verbalise (Woodward 2016, p. 7). Respondents also found their inability to articulate the attributes of their jeans frustrating and would fetch them to show her.

Alternatively, in the object interviews where jeans were looked at and touched, Woodward (2016, p. 8) found that respondents’ were more forthcoming and detailed in their articulation of memories particularly in ways that evoked their materiality (see also Mason and Davies 2009).

As seen in the work of Hurdley (2006) and Miller (2008), the situation of objects in place can also be important in the analysis of their materiality. Some object-elicitation methods place the participant in settings where they are surrounded by their objects. Pink et al.

(2017, pp. 125-126) describe how a tour of home “puts the materiality and sensoriality of home at the centre of the encounter”, producing interactions between the researcher, participant and whatever other things are brought into that context by the participant. In this way objects do not need to be preselected by the researcher but, if required, the researcher can play an active role in engaging the participant with their possessions. For example, Harris and Guillemin (2012, p. 695) suggest that the researcher can motion towards objects in a participant’s living room, inviting them to “hold them, speak about them, reflect on how they feel, [thereby] opening up points of memory”. A number of studies employ this approach, combining the ‘go-along’ with ‘talking through objects’. In their study, Hirschman et al. (2012, pp. 373-374) asked homeowners to simply ‘take the interviewer through’ the garage and ‘tell about’ the items in it. Similarly, Muzaini (2015, p. 103) found that the most powerful stories emerged when he asked respondents to

‘talk about’ objects around their homes or those they kept hidden away which they selected and brought out themselves.

Object-based interviews allow access to “unspeakable geographies” and are particularly useful in attempts to capture “the ephemeral, the fleeting [and] the immanence of place”

(Davies and Dwyer 2007, pp. 259, 261). Remembering plays an important part in these encounters whereby the object “laden with perceptual recall” becomes “a temporal conduit” of memories, emotions and experiences (Seremetakis 1994, p. 11). Muzaini (2015, p. 11) describes how if it had not been for the moment where memories were triggered for his respondents they would not have revealed those things they had rendered forgotten. In this way it was possible to extend beyond “meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation” (Lorimer 2005, p. 84, own emphasis) to that which is liminal, marginal and unremarkable. Undertaking object-elicitation interviews at participants’ self-storage units would allow for a greater depth of insight, furthering narratives provided in the first interviews.