Friendship as methodology: A multimodal cogenerative study of motherscholar wellbeing

This presentation explores the ways in which friendship (Leavy & Hesse-Biber, 2012?) can be conceptualized as a facilitator for research methodology. Over the course of seven months, two researchers living halfway across the world developed a research collaboration based upon a common experience and identification, as mothers in academia, to study motherscholars. Through a multimodal set of communicative practices ranging from texting on the phone, sharing and chatting through google docs, emailing, Skyping, Facetiming, we bridged the 13-hour time zone difference and developed a friendship. The study we created aimed to improve wellbeing by addressing the internal conflict, stress, and guilt of being neither fully at work nor fully at home as a motherscholar. While the study led to an increased sense of wellbeing, there was another factor that appears to have played an important role--the burgeoning friendship between the two of us, as motherscholars who have yet to meet face-to-face, but who became willing to collaborate and share professionally and personally. This presentation is relevant for those interested in emergent methods of qualitative research, including considerations for the ways friendship has implications for data analysis and data transformation