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Can people talk together about their practices? Focus groups, humour and…
Can people talk together about their practices? Focus groups, humour and the sensitive dynamics of everyday life (Browne 2015)
Introduction
Everyday practices related to water and energy resource consumption- hygiene of homes, clothes and bodies.
Emphasises the ethical and moral sensitivity regarding domestic practices should be central to the construction of everyday geographies
Creative use of methods has proven essential to the theoretical development of social practice theories and application in sustainable consumption research
Shameful feelings around 'dirty topics' such as stains in the laundry or bodies that sweat. Gossiping about others can overcome awkwardness and enables access to cultural norms underpinning thermal comfort
Laughter and humour in focus groups are a way of overcoming awkwardness around taboo and shameful topics, particularly within marginalised groups. Focus groups create an important social space to enable generation of data inaccessible through other methodologies
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Evaluating the focus groups: sharing stories, humour and incongruity
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The focus group was a safe space in which to share stories, about themselves, friends and family.
Through telling humorous stories, incongruousness between participants about the nature of 'normal' bodies and routines were myth busted. Sense of the shared meanings associated with societal ideas about cleanliness and freshness versus the diversity of what people actually do in their everyday lives. societal norms of washing bodies, clothes, and bedding reflected in the media.
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Conclusions
Despite critique, talk-based methods remain one of the
most widely used empirical tools to gain understandings
of everyday life, consumption and more recently sustainability
Focus groups or similar informal multiperson conversations in which humour and laughter feature enact a new type of data
The focus group is therefore a currently underused but potentially fruitful method to research mundane everyday practices because it allows new data to emerge, particularly about social meanings and conventions, the social organisation of everyday practices and connections across bundles of practices
This paper asserts that focus groups – particularly when
they invoke humour and laughter – are a useful research
strategy when exploring awkward, and socially taboo,
research encounters around everyday practice and sustainable consumption.
In summary, by enabling people to talk together about
their everyday practices, focus groups can: enhance
understandings of the diversity and dynamics of everyday
practices; reveal particular ideas of shared routines
and cultural conventions; challenge these social norms
through the highlighting of incongruences between
participants; highlight the connections between
performativity, materiality and cultural conventions; and
enable reflections on the negotiation of the dynamics and
routines related to practices that underpin household
water and energy sustainability.