Mapping as a Method: History and Theoretical Commitments
Valerie Futch & Michelle Fine (2014)
The article highlights three mapping studies conducted by the authors to demonstrate the utility of mapping as a useful method for social inquiry and gathering information about subjectivities and identities. The authors historically situate the mapping method as stemming from Milgram and Joledet, Winnicott, and critical feminist geographers, but note that the method has been overlooked by much of social psychology as a discipline. Interested in investigating “life-space” (from Lewin) the authors contend that mapping “can be rediscovered and revitalized as a highly useful qualitative method for researching our increasingly complex and ‘hyphenated’ lives” (44).
Mapping can provide insight into how people narrate and represent their own lives, life spaces, self, and others and “enables researchers to work with visual material that is highly interpretive, across conceptual landscapes (from the individual to the social), and in between various contexts and shifting structural conditions” (44). Mapping can highlight and revive the focus (historically from Dewey, James, DuBois and others) on the spheres that individuals inhabit daily and help researchers understand how, quoting Joledet, the “link between space and identity, space and experience, is linked to personal history.”
Futch and Fine focus on three of their research studies to demonstrate “mapping as a developmental, longitudinal, identity-based, and affect-laden method”. To trace identity across time and space and examine how students carried inquiry-based, ethnically and linguistically diverse school practices on in life after graduation, researchers asked immigrant graduates to “map your journey from your home country to where you are today in life. Include people,places, obstacles, and opportunities along the way.” This research lead to a conceptualization of “dialogical selves” and framed mapping as a “narrative and dialogical approach that is premised on deepening the conversations between researcher and participant in a way the privileges the inner thought-process and experiences of the participant” (46).
In a study with Muslim-American students, mapping invited the participants to depict the complexities of living with multiple, possibly opposing, identities. In this study, maps were analyzed qualitatively to understand these complex identity negotiations but also categorically, looking at maps as depictions of integrated, parallel, or conflicted selves. These maps provided insight into contradictions between political context and subjectivities.
In the third study, mapping was combined with several other methods, including individual and group interviews. Individuals who had previously participated in a teen-theatre group came together to design the next stages of the research project. They mapped their past experiences with the theatre group and openly discussed their maps with one another (since they had known each other previously, this was feasible for the group). The directions for mapping in this instance were purposefully loose and resulted in new lines of thought/investigation for the researchers: “understanding personal experiences with a particular space and program can open up, for the researcher, a new line of understanding and journeys into conceptual terrains unanticipated at the start of the project” (52).
In opening up new lines of inquiry, Futch and Fine situate mapping as a meditational method, “it dynamically interfaces between the theories we have used to guide our inquiry and the richly layered stories we gathered in each study…[it] actively elicited new interpretations, highlighted hidden stories, and provided a new lens for viewing other data” (53). Maps allow researchers to jump scale, analyzing phenomena at the level of the individual, social, cultural, political, material, and beyond.
Maps act as facilitators, initiating a process that creates opportunities for participants to open up, express creativity, feel ownership over the data, and promotes discussion and reflection about the the map and the focal topics. As a spatial/dialogical method maps provide “representations of the data that often contest or elaborate upon the theoretical claims under investigation.” Maps show how a person moves through space, how the person and the space are changed by this interaction, and how the space can be “embodied, metabolized, and carried over time within a person” (54). Maps also often lend insight into both the personal and shared social meanings of a space, place, or experience and “allows a collective image to emerge and for the individual differences of experience to simultaneously flesh out how this image is experienced on the personal level.”
As an analytic tool, maps work particularly well in dialogue with other data and help to interrogate a researchers points of analysis by providing a visual (not textual) and interpretive way to understanding and representing experience. They provide expanded opportunities for the participants’ voices to enter into data analysis and act as a “discursive tool, one that sits in conversation – and physical juxtaposition – with another data source, such as an interview or survey” (55).
“Mapping holds particular promise for theorizing, re-presenting and analyzing complexity and shifts over time and space, for capturing the continuities and the ruptures, tracing the solid and perforated lines of lives.”
Cite: Futch, V. A., & Fine, M. (2014). Mapping as a Method: History and Theoretical Commitments. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 11(1), 42–59. http://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2012.719070
