INT. J. SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY,
2003, VOL. 6,
NO.
3, 267–271
Capturing change: doing research in a society undergoing transformation ´ SMILJKA TOMANOVIC (Received 26 August 2002; accepted 3 March 2003)
Introduction This paper is a methodological note from my research, which raises the question of how a rapidly and profoundly changing social context influences the process of building and developing a study over time. The paper is based on a longitudinal qualitative study with children in two types of families (families of workers and families of professionals) in two Belgrade communities.1 The research was done in two waves: the first wave in 1993/1994 when the children were pre-school age (4–7), and the second in 2000, when the children were from 11 to 14 years old.2 The details for each wave of the study are given in table 1 below. The impetus for the initial research came from theories of social reproduction (Bourdieu 1973, 1986, Willis 1983) and I began with the question: what is the impact of family habitus on the everyday life of children? I decided to study pre-school children because I was interested in whether processes of social reproduction can be detected at an early age among children within families. I adopted a structuration theoretical framework in the research with my initial subjects, worker families. Having undertaken a first analysis of the empirical material, the picture of the everyday life of worker families became very familiar to me in a ‘taken for granted’ way, as if it was the only possible way of rearing children. As a result I decided to extend the study to a contrasting sample of professional families (professionals and artists) in an inner city area. With these two contrasting samples I adopted a constant comparative method in the research design and interpretation. An advantage of this process was that it enabled me to ensure that the boundaries, which Smiljka Tomanovi´c (PhD, MPhil in Sociology, University of Belgrade) is Lecturer in Sociology of the ˘ Family in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Cika Ljubina 18–20, 11 000 Belgrade; tel: + 381 11 32 06 193; e-mail:
[email protected]. Her research interest is in the sociology of childhood, particularly issues such as: the structuring of children’s everyday life through the lifestyle of families; children’s participation within family life; and qualitative research with children in families. She was Visiting Scholar at Oxford University (1989) and Durham University (1991), UK, and Visiting Academic attached to the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London (2001). She has published a book and a number of articles in domestic and international journals. International Journal of Social Research Methodology ISSN 1364-5579 print/ISSN 1464-5300 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1364557032000091879
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Table 1.
Description of two waves of the study
Time Subjects
Method
1993/ Families with 1994 children 4–7
Standardized interviews
Industrial area 100
Case studies
Industrial area 12
Families with Case studies children 11–14
Industrial area 11
Inner city 10
Schoolchildren Survey 12–13
Industrial area 75
Inner city 75
2000
Site and number of cases Inner city 32
Housing estate 49
were taken for granted by the participants, were not also taken for granted by me as a researcher. At the first wave of the study the sample consisted of 72 worker families and 21 professional/artist families each with children aged from 4–7. I conducted standardized interviews with parents at both sites and in-depth interviews with parents and children (in 12 families: six girls and six boys, in the industrial area only).
The context The research was undertaken in a very specific socio-historical context in 1993/1994: civil war had brought enormous devastation in human and material resources to the country. In all domains—political, economic, institutional, everyday—the social infrastructure was in a state of collapse with negative consequences for people’s morale and a retreat into private life (Lazi´c et al. 1994, Bol˘ci´c et al. 1995, Tomanovi´cMihajlovi´c 1997). The social context was marked by total upheaval, an inflation rate of thousands of billions of dinars a year, an extremely high level of unemployment and a surplus workforce (estimated to be almost 50% of those employed in the state sector). Many people were on enforced unpaid leave from work (particularly from the industrial sector), which meant that women returned to the home, men moved into the grey economy, and children were taken out of their child care institutions. In addition to socio-economic crisis, the civil war also brought with it an ideology of ‘national awakening’, which postulated traditional values and orientations from the level of the nation state to family roles. The social situation could be seen as producing a process of retraditionalization as opposed to the detraditionalization posited for societies of late modernity. This points at the particularity of the context of the research compared with such societies.
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Most Serbian families in this situation had to develop ‘survival strategies’, the most prominent of which was and still is ‘deprivation’—a lowering of the realization of needs. The ‘brutalization’ of everyday life, in terms of the struggle to survive, is at the same time the consequence and the cause of most families and individuals falling into the category of ‘losers’ (rather than ‘gainers’) from the social transformation (Mili´c 1995). This situation has very negative repercussions on children’s lives. The rapid and profound change of our society, with its repercussions on social structure and family life, was an important challenge for the initial research, particularly in terms of analysis and interpretation. I realized, however, that it afforded a unique opportunity to examine the impact of rapid social change within a generation. This realization allowed me to develop a previously unplanned longitudinal study. I decided to undertake a longitudinal qualitative follow-up study of the generation of children in my initial study, ultimately envisaging four waves of research, taking the children to their mid 20s. In the spring of 2000, I conducted the second wave of research through case studies, based on 42 interviews in 21 families: 11 workers’ families in the industrial area and 10 professional families in the inner city. The child was interviewed separately, and the parents jointly (when possible). I chose the age of 11–14 for the children for this second wave, since so called ‘higher forms of primary school’ are considered to be a critical point in children’s cognitive and social competences. Among the 21 children interviewed were 13 boys and eight girls who were studied as pre-schoolers in 1993 and 1994. Originally 24 children were chosen for the longitudinal study, 12 for each sub-sample. The families of two girls had emigrated and the parents of one girl were unwilling to be interviewed again (so that girls are under represented in the sample). There could be no substitute for these absent families and so I faced the problem of sample attrition suffered in many longitudinal studies, although exacerbated in this case by the specific conditions of the time.3 Given the circumstances, the development of the longitudinal study was flexible, and contingent, and to meet issues as they arose, I employed a range of methods. These included standardized interviews, case studies based on in-depth interviews and observation (in the first wave) and case studies and a survey (in the second wave). The survey was developed through qualitative analysis of interviews and aimed to test some of the findings on family and children’s everyday life on a wider and more representative population. The idea at that point was to broaden the number of child participants in the project, and make the study population more socially diverse, so that the findings would be more representative of this generation of children. The survey sample consisted of 199 children from five schools in Belgrade: two in the industrial area, two in the inner city area and one in a housing estate in a large Belgrade municipality with a very heterogeneous population. The children, 107 boys and 92 girls, were in the sixth and seventh forms of primary school, mostly 12 and 13 years old. In both waves of the research, the analysis is based on a combination of a quantitative comparative analysis between samples with interpretation based on evidence from case studies.
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Theoretical and methodological considerations The major theoretical and methodological points that I wish to make in relation to the study and the research decisions made in its course (briefly in the space available) are as follows. The initial study was a cross-sectional investigation, providing a snapshot of the children’s everyday lives in a context of social disruption and rapid change. Whilst interesting in itself, it could not provide a link between a changing social context and those lives. The longitudinal element would enable me to focus on the children’s social biographies in order to examine any such links. I was interested in examining the existence and/or impact of the social processes of individualization or reproduction in their lives. The focus was on changes in the children’s lives, so I needed to take into account changes within their families. Issues which came to the surface in the social context were coping strategies, status consistency, and family atmosphere. A question for the research and interpretation here was when and how some contextual features (for example, strategies) become structural patterns (Bjornberg 1991). The research aimed to test the structuration thesis that social strata are reproduced through the reproduction of family habitus. A consequence of the context of ‘blocked transformation’ and profound social crisis outlined above was the restructuring of social strata and pauperization of the middle strata.4 The theoretical issue for the research raised by this context of social crisis was, would the social situation (contextual factors) outweigh structural features (social stratification)? Would the crisis ‘erase’ structural differences and boundaries between social strata? For example, at the time many social researchers in Serbia thought that the middle strata would disappear as a result of their impoverishment. But as current sociological studies of Serbian society have shown, these strata have maintained their social positions through factors other than the classical indicators of social status, and among these was lifestyle. My research suggests that subtle but significant distinctions in lifestyle are becoming the basis for differentiation within as well as between social strata (Tomanovi´c-Mihajlovi´c 1997). This suggests that structural elements were still maintained but by means other than those prevalent before the crisis. While a dynamic (longitudinal) approach is valuable for capturing social change (individual transitions as well as transformations of societies), it can also show the complex interplay between individual, group and social structural and institutional dynamics (Walker and Leisering 1998: 24). My research points clearly to how social structures, within a changing social context, can act as both enabling and/or constraining on particular individuals and groups. The specific social context, which I outlined briefly above, demanded a flexible approach to the research. By its definition qualitative methodology is more ‘open’ and flexible (Daly 1992: 4, Huberman and Miles 1998: 185), compared with quantitative, when a study aims to capture rapid social change. Such a research context demands a study design that changes over time—a ‘flowing design’,5 which is neither planned nor accidental.
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The complexity of a multi-layered dynamic social context also raises problems of interpretation: how to understand and interpret changes, in terms of their origins, level, scope, meanings and impacts. Notes 1. Rakovica is an industrial and residential area located in the suburbs of Belgrade, but not far from the city centre (15–20 km). It has been chosen for the research as a working-class community with work and residence in the same locality. Vracar is an inner city area of Belgrade, considered by its inhabitants to have a community identity. 2. Primary school in Serbia starts from the age of seven and is mandatory. It is divided into two levels (four forms each): lower and higher. The children from the second wave of the study thus attend ‘higher forms of primary school’. 3. One of the families emigrated to the Netherlands during NATO bombardment in 1999, while the other family, of mixed ethnic origin, emigrated to Croatia (the mother’s birth place). The motivation for their emigration stemmed from economic and political reasons and basically from the sense of social endangerment. Thus sample attrition in my study is influenced by the social context. 4. Although there were some disputes, the authors I refer to have adopted the structural model that includes non-manual routine workers in ‘workers strata’, while ‘middle strata’ include professionals and self-employed (small entrepreneurs), and ‘elite strata’ consist of those who possess (political and economic) power. I have adopted the model and included various non-manual workers from the service sector in my ‘workers families’, while I focused on a part of ‘middle strata’—‘professional families’. 5. As defined by Julia Brannen at the concluding session of the seminar on longitudinal qualitative research held on 8 April 2002 at SBU.
References Bjornberg, U. (ed.) (1991) Methods for the Study of Changing Forms of Life (Vienna: European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences). Bol˘ci´c, S. (ed.) (1995) Dru˘stvene promene i svakodnevni z˘ ivot: Srbija po˘cetkom devedesetih (Social Changes and Everyday Life: Serbia at the Beginning of the 90s) (Belgrade: ISI FF). Bourdieu, P. (1973) Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In R. Brown (ed.) Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change (London: Tavistock). Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Daly, K. (1992) The fit between qualitative research and characteristics of families. In J. Gilgun, K. Daly and G. Handel (eds) Qualitative Methods in Family Research (Newbury Park: Sage). Huberman, M. and Miles, M. (1998) Data management and analysis methods. In N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds) Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials (London: Sage). Lazi´c, M. et al. (1994) Society in Crisis (Belgrade: Filip Vi˘snji´c). Mili´c, A. (1995) Everyday family life in the maelstrom of social disintegration. Sociologija (International Issue), 4. Tomanovi´c-Mihajlovi´c, S. (1997) Detinjstvo u Rakovici: Svakodnevni z˘ ivot dece u radni˘ckoj porodici (Childhood in Rakovica: Everyday Life of Children in Working-Class Families) (Belgrade: ISI FF). Walker, R. and Leisering, L. (1998) New tools: towards a dynamic science of modern society. In L. Leisering and R. Walker (eds) The Dynamics of Modern Society: Poverty, Policy and Welfare (Bristol: Policy Press). Willis, P. (1983) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (London: Gower).
