16 - Composite narratives, developing characters: a method of creative data analysis in developing public engagement artefacts

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, we reflect upon our experiences of translating research findings for public audiences through the production of two artefacts. In both cases, we created composite ‘narratives’ – a collection of participant accounts combined and reshaped to produce central messages and stories (Willis, 2018), and ‘characters’, fictional participants combined from several participant characteristics whose lives the narratives described. We did this primarily because our data pertained to personal and sensitive issues which, when presented in the form of a fuller narrative, risked making our participants recognisable. However, in the process of creating our composite characters, we realised that this work was more than a process of anonymisation – it involved rich and creative analytical thinking. In producing both artefacts we found ourselves moving iteratively between cases and themes and thinking critically about diversity and how this can be represented. We also engaged in productive processes of generalisation in our attempts to harness the ‘spirit’ of our data, striving to identify the nub of how relationships, practices, and the rhythms of everyday life worked for all of our participants.

Katherine Davies and Adam Carter, researching how Brexit was experienced in the everyday lives of UK families, worked with a web designer to create an online exhibition representing a year in the life of three ‘families’ in ‘Brexit Britain’. The timeline came out of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)- funded qualitative study conducted between July 2019 and July 2021, that sought to explore how Brexit was being lived and experienced in everyday family life in the UK. Working with 15 families, the project explored how people's views, behaviours, and attitudes towards Brexit were influenced by the relationships in which they were embedded, and vice versa. The project took a multimethod qualitative approach and produced a variety of data forms, including interviews, diaries, video observations of participants watching Brexit- related television (or ‘Goggleboxing’3), field diaries, notes on ‘hanging out’ with the families, and texts, social media, and email communications. Katherine and Adam worked with each family for at least a year, through the various parliamentary votes, elections, intense media coverage, and rancorous, relentless public debates.