The Listening Guide method as an interdisciplinary approach: Accounting for psychological processes in sociological frameworks.

Abstract

As a sociologist studying sexual violence in higher education, I was faced with a question that needed to account for the psychological component of social processes. Specifically, I needed a method that could help me gain powerful insight into both conscious and unconscious processes, while also paying close attention to social processes and social and institutional structures. The Listening Guide (LG) method, an interdisciplinary qualitative method and methodology based in psychological inquiry, gave me a way (method) to study an issue where a psychological lens was a crucial component to understanding larger social phenomenon. In this paper, using a case study from my research on university Title IX administrators and their experiences implementing sexual violence policies, I demonstrate how the LG can be used as an interdisciplinary method to study questions with a psychological component. I highlight how the relational aspect of the method, along with the explicitly owned interpretation, are key in helping researchers discover both conscious and unconscious processes. As the LG continues to be used in fields outside of psychology, this paper serves as an example of how the method can be used to bring an interdisciplinary lens to studying questions that have not yet considered individuals’ “psychological logic.” It also starts a larger conversation of how the LG can be utilized across academic fields to gain new insight into important social problems.

We Need to be as a Group: Using and Evaluating the Listening Guide in Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography With an Affective ‘Fifth Listen’ as a Tool to (re)construct Identities

“…In its centring of relationality, the LG is an inherently affective methodology. Our research suggested that the LG in its standard iteration of four listens risks forgetting to pay “attention to the feel of the interview” (Cruz, 2021, p. 173, emphasis added) or talk data; missing the multi-layered emotional meanings that the LG has the potential to surface.…”

“…We attested that these narratives cannot be separated from the “out-of-field voices” that impact upon the embodied voice itself (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p. 748). These noiseless but meaningful voices consist of “larger social and cultural contexts [that] are also taken into consideration, as are dominant themes, metaphors, symbols, repeated images, and contradictions” (Cruz, 2021, p. 174).…”

Being Essential and Feeling Expendable: Black Female Clinicians’ Narratives About Working in the U.S. During Dual Pandemics

“…Moreover, these lived experiences frequently occur in traumatic, violent, and oppressive contexts that deeply affect all members of Black communities. Such effects are consistently embedded in the narrative voices of the research participants (Cruz, 2021). Thus, narrative inquiry and LG privilege the polyvocal nature of lived experience knowledge embedded in people's stories.…”