Shifting Boundaries and Power in the Research Process: the Example of Researching ‘step-Families’

In this chapter we utilize the concept of boundaries as both a substantive and methodological issue, to look at aspects of power and resistance in the research process. Our substantive topic is parenting and step-parenting after divorce or separation. Our methodology is qualitative and intensive, concerned with listening on their own terms (as far as possible) to individuals’ ‘accounts of’, or ‘stories about’, their understandings and experiences in the course of interactions with others.1 We are particularly interested in the processes involved in how biological and step-parents actively create, understand and make sense of ‘family’ and parenting both within and between households, and within the enabling or constraining wider context of their lives.2 Our fieldwork has involved interviews with resident parents, step-parents and nonresident parents, living in complex household arrangements that may also change significantly over time. To be a ‘family’ unit always implicitly involves issues about boundaries, for there needs to be some sense of what the unit refers to. In the particular complex and changeable circumstances of our interviewees’ lives, the issue of household and family boundaries becomes crucial, being highly significant for our research focus of parenting within and between households