Picturing ourselves in the world: Drawings,interpretative phenomenological analysis and the relational mapping interview

ABSTRACT

Some aspects of experience can be challenging for research participants to verbalise. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) researchers need to get experience-near to meet their phenomenological commitments, capturing the “texture” and quality of existence, and placing participants in relation to events, objects, others, and the world. Incorporating drawing into IPA designs provides a vehicle through which participants can better explore and communicate their lifeworlds. IPA researchers also require rich accounts to fulfil their interpretative commitments. Drawing taps into multiple sensory registers simultaneously, providing polysemous data, which in turn lends itself to hermeneutic analysis. This article outlines a multimodal method, the relational mapping interview, which was developed to understand the relational context of various forms of distress and disruption. We illustrate how the approach results in richly nuanced visual and verbal accounts of relational experience. Drawing on an “expanded hermeneutic phenomenology,” we suggest how visual data can be analysed within an IPA framework to offer significant experiential insights.     

Manipulating the reported age in earliest memories

ABSTRACT

Previous work suggests that the estimated age in adults’ earliest autobiographical memories depends on age information implied by the experimental context [e.g., Kingo, O. S., Bohn, A., & Krøjgaard, P. (2013). Warm-up questions on early childhood memories affect the reported age of earliest memories in late adolescence. Memory, 21(2), 280–284. doi:10.1080/09658211.2012.729598] and that the age in decontextualised snippets of memory is younger than in more complete accounts (i.e., event memories [Bruce, D., Wilcox-O’Hearn, L. A., Robinson, J. A., Phillips-Grant, K., Francis, L., & Smith, M. C. (2005). Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia. Memory & Cognition, 33(4), 567–576. doi:10.3758/BF03195324]). We examined the malleability of the estimated age in undergraduates’ earliest memories and its relation with memory quality. In Study 1 (n?=?141), vignettes referring to events happening at age 2 rendered earlier reported ages than examples referring to age 6. Exploratory analyses suggested that event memories were more sensitive to the age manipulation than memories representing a single, isolated scene (i.e., snapshots). In Study 2 (n?=?162), asking self-relevant and public-event knowledge questions about participants’ preschool years prior to retrieval yielded comparable average estimated ages. Both types of semantic knowledge questions rendered earlier memories than a no-age control task. Overall, the reported age in snapshots was younger than in event memories. However, age-differences between memory types across conditions were not statistically significant. Together, the results add to the growing literature indicating that the average age in earliest memories is not as fixed as previously thought.