Each Wednesday, I usually write a post from my dissertation.
Different scrapbookers showed me pages that are of common events such as holidays or life transitions. Seeing how different scrapbookers capture these moments in their scrapbooks illustrates how standardized scrapbooks can be. Keep in mind that some of my respondents were deeply embedded within the scrapbooking community and others were completely unaware that such community existed. Regardless, patterns among layouts from different scrapbookers emerged.
For example, pages about childbirth and pregnancy typically include sonogram photographs, medical bracelets from the hospital stay, and name cards placed in the baby’s basinet at the hospital.
Atypical pages about the same subject include WIC checks and Medicaid cards. Moreover, it is rare that a respondent emphasizes a lower social class in their scrapbooks through including things indicating government assistance as this respondent did.
Why do you think that scrapbooks come to look similar to one another? Is it really atypical to emphasize a lower social class in a scrapbook or was this a problem with my sample? (Most of my sample was middle to upper middle class based on income and education.)
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
