It’s been a couple of weeks, since I last posted information directly about my dissertation. In previous posts, I discussed my sample. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about my methods.
Interviews
I used both in-depth interviewing and photo-elicitation interviewing. During the last portion of each interview, I was shown a selection of scrapbook pages from my respondents. We talked about these pages. Then, if I also was interviewing one of their friends of a family member, I viewed the scrapbook pages with that person and asked them questions about the pages. My basic purpose of this was to see if the person who did not create the scrapbook page could tell me what is going on or not. Was the message the scrapbooker intending being received?
How did respondents select their pages?
I asked my respondents to select 10-15 of their scrapbook pages that they felt were representative of what they scrapbook and 5-10 scrapbook pages that they felt were atypical. I purposefully left “representative” and “atypical” undefined. I ended up being shown about 40 pages from each respondent (anywhere between 1 and 149 scrapbook pages). I ended up viewing 1,493 scrapbook pages (about 2-3 times as many as I anticipated). I did not analyze the scrapbook pages separately from the interview.
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.
