The listening guide: voice-centred-relational analysis of private subjectivities

Abstract

Purpose This paper focuses on the analytical importance of voice and the value of listening and representing voices in private contexts. It highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in family research. The paper introduces the listening guide as a unique analytical approach to sharpen researchers’ understanding of private experiences and articulations. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual and technical paper. It problematises voice, authority and analytical representation in the private location of family and examines how relational dynamics interact with the subtleties of voice in research. It also provides a practical illustration of the listening guide detailing how researchers can use this analytical approach. Findings The paper illustrates how the listening guide works as an analytical method, structured around four stages and applied to interview transcript excerpts. Practical implications The listening guide bridges private and public knowledge-making, by identifying competing voices and recognises relations of power in family research. It provides qualitative market researchers with an analytical tool to hear changes and continuities in participants’ sense of self over time. Social implications The paper highlights how peripheral voices and silence can be analytically surfaced in private domains. A variety of studies and data can be explored with this approach, however, research questions involving vulnerable or marginal experiences are particularly suitable. Originality/value The paper presents the listening guide as a novel analytic method for researching family life – one, which recovers the importance of voice and serves as a means to address the lack of debate on voice and authority in qualitative market research. It also highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in tracing the multiple subjectivities of research participants. It interrupts conventional qualitative analysis methods, directing attention away from conventional coding and towards listening as an alternative route to knowledge.

Listening to Hospital Personnel’s Narratives during the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…It differs from other means of analysis in that it places emphasis on the psychological complexities of people through attention to voice as a manifestation of the psyche. The Listening Guide in its attention to voice—and silence—thus provides a way of exploring the interplay of inner and outer worlds and of bringing the inner world out into the open [ 33 , 34 , 35 ]. By focusing on different voices, on the dynamics and interplay of these voices within the interview transcript, and on the socio-cultural setting of the research, the Guide establishes a contextual framework for understanding and/or interpreting the narratives of the interviewees and thereby facilitates psychological discovery.…”

Exploring the relationship between integrated marketing communications and decentralised organisational structure: a heuristics perspective

“…This ability was founded on opportunities which technology of the internet delivered, which enabled integration and coordination of communication activities (Cook, 2004; Kliatchko, 2005). Initially, the idea of IMC was the “one voice” phenomenon: bundling promotional mix elements to create consistency in all messages (Kitchen, 2017; Kitchen et al , 2004a; Hutton and Lystor, 2021).…”

Guest editorial

“…Reflecting on paradigms means being able to break away from one’s frame of reference and to look at what it is not capable of saying, and to instead consider the multiple voices that may exist within the same narrative. One of the articles in this special issue presents this type of reflexivity via a listening guide (Hutton and Lystor, 2020) that offers an analytical model to parse out the polyphonic voices located within the private sphere. The practices involved in the research process depends on the paradigms in question but usually involves identifying a research problem, locating, generating and analyzing the data needed to solve the problem and finally writing up a research narrative recounting the route.…”

“…In this special issue, two articles contribute to such theoretical debate on reflexivity. Hutton and Lystor (2020) advocate for a listening guide in which researchers move away from the theoretical pressure to provide a coherent narrative in which the story of participants is neatly arranged, arguably with the support of a ready-made theoretical framework. Instead, they propose to celebrate rather than silencing the multiple subjectivities of the participants.…”