incorporating a home tour within the methodology provided me with access to an alternative insight by focussing on the material home. As Latour notes, materiality is an inherent aspect of living:
‘Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, you are by that very act interested in things.’ (Latour, 2002: 20)
It is an aspect which cannot be fully captured in an interview setting and requires a physical exploration of a space. This need reflects the assertion of proponents of walking interviews that ‘if you really want to understand a place you have to go and see it for yourself’ (Emmel and Clark, 2011: 4). Walking interviews, also known as the ‘walk and talk’
(Jones et al, 2008), the ‘bimble’ (Anderson, 2004) and the ‘go-along’ (Kusenbach, 2003;
Carpiano, 2009), are seen as ‘an ideal technique for exploring issues around people’s relationship with space’ (Jones et al, 2008: 2). They are a ‘hybrid’ of interview and participant observation techniques (Kusenbach, 2003; Carpiano, 2009) which can take on any number of forms. For Kusenbach, the walking interview was used to discover how Los Angeles residents experience and perceive problems in their local neighbourhood by
talking with them while simply ‘hanging out’ in the area (Kusenbach, 2003:463). For Emmel and Clark (2009; 2011), exploring experiences of neighbourhood community within inner-city Leeds, participants gave a tour of their local area while giving a commentary of their use of the space. Whether being given a tour by participants or simply being with them in the field, walking interviews are valued for their capacity to empower participants and to build rapport between researcher and researched (Carpiano, 2009). Walking interviews are associated with being ‘out-and-about’, usually within a neighbourhood locality; however, employing a similar method within the home brings about the same benefits without the disadvantages of difficulties in using recording equipment out in the open, the risk of bad weather, and the public exposure of the participant known to be associated with walking interviews (Emmel and Clark, 2009).
Home tours have been used in two significant pieces of research into the home. The first proponent of home tours as a social science method was Pink (2004) in her investigations into the sensory home as a gendered domestic space in Spain and Britain. Pink focused on the ways in which domestic space is created, experienced and maintained, recording men and women’s discussions and enactments of their domestic routines with a video camera as they gave tours of their homes. The second prominent use of home tours is in Tolia-Kelly’s work with twenty-two South Asian women living in North-West London,
conducting interviews, focus groups, visual mapping and home tours to explore the way in which their physical homes represent their identities as British immigrants (2004a; 2004b;
2004c). She found that self-expression through the appearance of one’s home becomes even more significant in the dwellings of migrants in which objects ‘operate as a gateway into other environments, moments and social experiences’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2004b: 286). In her study, objects displayed in the home represented both the individual participants’
biographies and their collective identities as South Asian migrants, described by Tolia-Kelly as ‘textures of identification to a sense of community, home and heritage’ (2004c: 326).
For her participants, objects were a means of asserting a sense of territory- building both a material and cultural home in which they feel they belong. Her study reflects the important interplay between the material, the sensual and the imagined. The nature of display is also an important theme in discussing the materiality of the home, as objects reflect not only how one views oneself, but how one wishes to be viewed by others (Leach, 2010). Pink’s home tour method focused on the experience of the home while Tolia-Kelly concentrated on specific objects within the home, with both recognising the home as a site inherently linked to identity and belonging.
The methods used to capture the home tour data in Pink and Tolia-Kelly’s studies reflect the type of data they sought: with video reflecting the embodied, sensory nature of Pink’s work, and the photography reflecting the object-as-artefact emphasis in Tolia-Kelly’s project. In both of these cases and others involving walking interviews or home tours, photographs tend to be presented as evidence or examples of observations for readers. In other studies, the technique of photograph elicitation is used to provoke conversation by sharing photographs with participants. However, my research utilised photography in a different way that combines the benefits of both of these techniques. My home tour consisted of participants showing me around their homes, talking about the creation and lived experience of each room and pointing out objects they found significant to
photograph. The interview schedule used in the home tour was designed to prompt discussion on how the room was been created, how it was experienced and the story behind objects pointed out along the way, in recognition that ‘biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure’ (Kopytoff, 1986: 67). Rather than using developed snapshots or footage as future ‘evidence’ for data dissemination or as a topic of conversation for later interviews, my focus was on the process of photography. I found that by asking participants to select what they wished to photograph in the home tour process, conversation was directed and inspired in the direction chosen by
participants. This method of photography elicitation, rather than photograph elicitation, gave purpose to the home tour while providing in-the-moment access to new topics of conversation. The physicality of the method also made it easily accessible and engaging for children and adults.
As well as being valuable for its participant-led nature, accessibility and ability to elicit topics of discussion and an atmosphere for conversation that cannot be obtained in a traditional face-to-face sit-down interview, there were also benefits associated with data triangulation. Combining the techniques of diagraming, photography, tours and interviews provided a more complex picture of the experience of belonging that may have been missed if interviews used in isolation. For example, ten-year-old Nikolai Lamiński claimed to belong to Britain and no longer to identify with Poland in his interviews. This shift was also identified by his parents in interviews and supported by Nikolai’s diagrams which centred around his day-to-day interests of playing on his computer and spending time with his parents and school friends in Manchester. However, during the home tour, in Nikolai’s bedroom were displayed numerous symbols of his attachment to Poland, including a Polish flag, Polish eagle badges, gifts from Polish family and friends, and
treasured items brought from Poland, in particular a suitcase filled with toy cars that Nikolai claims was his sole luggage upon arrival in Britain for the first time (see Figure 5).
Upon discussion Nikolai’s attachment to Poland was found to be steeped in personal childhood memories, rather than an association with a nationalist culture. No longer identifying with Poland, did not mean that items that clearly demonstrate a transnational attachment were not present or meaningful in Nikolai’s life. However, for Nikolai, such items symbolised his childhood, rather than a ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) that may have been interpreted from photographs in isolation of direct interview.
Figure 4: Photographs taken of items in Nikolai’s bedroom
From left to right: a Polish flag made from cutting up an old French flag; a Polish eagle badge; and some of the cars Nikolai brought with him from Poland.
Data from the home tour data was primarily captured using a digital Dictaphone.
However, while listening to the audio recording and looking at the photographs from a home tour during the analysis process provided some sense of the embodied experience of the tour, I also chose to draw a diagram as soon as possible after the tour had taken place that mapped the route of the tour and detailed the moments or aspects I found significant (see Figure 4 for an example of a home tour diagram). Using this combination of data in analysis provided a greater insight into the home as both a sensory, lived experience and a site of materiality and meaning, reflecting the multiple meanings of home explored in the previous chapter. Analysis techniques are explored further later in the chapter.
Figure 5: Example of a home tour diagram (Lamiński family)