Abstract
This chapter outlines some key approaches towards understanding the unremarkable. It focuses first on a sociological orientation to the everyday world as key to the enterprise, and then on a variety of complimentary approaches for elaborating or surfacing the unremarkable character of everyday life. It considers the kinds of data resources that are routinely used to elaborate the unremarkable, and the relationship between data resource and analysis as a constituent element of working ‘in the wild’. We hope this will be a valuable resource for researchers and students alike.
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Notes
- 1.
Structured interviews also exist but these are otherwise known as ‘questionnaires’, the stuff of surveys and quantitative research.
- 2.
In the case of the psychiatric hostel, through field studies of the day-to-day work and rounds of the hostel staff involved in caring for residents, which provided insights to craft the probe packs around and ask the residents questions about that they could elaborate by returning probe materials (photos, maps, postcards, etc.) at their leisure.
- 3.
There are rare exceptions to written consent such as participants who cannot read or write - not including children (whose parents or legal guardians must consent to the research) - but where written consent can be obtained then it should.
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Crabtree, A., Tolmie, P., Chamberlain, A. (2020). “Research in the Wild”: Approaches to Understanding the Unremarkable as a Resource for Design. In: Chamberlain, A., Crabtree, A. (eds) Into the Wild: Beyond the Design Research Lab. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18020-1_3
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