Abstract
This article is concerned with the doing and production of data. We ask how data are made in intimate spaces such as the home in collaboration with the different parties involved in home-based care and services. The article builds on ethnographic field notes from 73 home visits, in the context of home-based mental health, substance abuse and social care for adults in Finland and Sweden. Drawing on affect theory, the article aims to foreground aspects of the production of data and research that are often edited out of the research process. In so doing, we argue that the production of data would not be possible without the active and affective collaboration of all parties involved in home visits. Thus, the article scrutinizes in detail the efforts made by different parties, such as researchers, clients and workers to do and produce data. While we study an atypical setting of institutional interaction, we contend that affects and affective relations gain particular importance in the home.
Highlights
Walid has just sat down on the sofa
The excerpt above can be read as a meditation for much of what follows. It is an example of home-based social care and the ways in which mobile ethnographic fieldwork in intimate places such as the home is shaped by affective relations, and new roles and positions for the researcher and research participant
While it is well known that data are not merely ‘gathered’, but rather produced (Law and Urry, 2004), co-constructed (Jordan, 2006), embodied (Coffey, 1999), described (Wolcott, 1994) or inscribed (Goffman, 1989), we suggest that the production of data is not possible without the active and affective collaboration of all parties involved, especially when data are produced in intimate spaces
Summary
Walid has just sat down on the sofa. “How are you?” Kristina, the worker, asks. It is an example of home-based social care and the ways in which mobile ethnographic fieldwork in intimate places such as the home is shaped by affective relations, and new roles and positions for the researcher and research participant. This meant that we aimed to participate in home visits as researchers who tried to disturb the customary flow of client-worker interaction as little as possible, we were aware of our overlapping roles as participants and observers during the fieldwork (see Gold, 1958).
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