The last few decades have witnessed profound changes in family forms and the meaning of marriage. These processes are connected with growing numbers of parental divorces and separations. While traditional families were characterized by standardization in family forms and predictability in family transitions, contemporary families are facing a growing amount of unforeseen transitions and greater diversity and complexity in the life paths of family members. Besides unexpected transitions, such as divorce, families encounter several expected transitions, such as a child starting school. Transitions also mean changes in everyday actions, emotions and the form of relations. These processes of differentiation and erosion have a major impact, in particular, on children and young people.

Therefore, in family studies we should deepen our understanding of the everyday practices in which families are engaged, such as doings, moral concerns, emotions, interaction, daily relationships, coordinates of time and space, routines and rules. When focusing on daily life, the researcher faces a methodological question: in what ways, that is, by what methods, can the relevant aspects of daily family life be captured in an ecologically valid way?

In the symposium we concentrate on three new innovative methods combining both textual and visual approaches. These methods are electronic diaries, network maps and life-lines. Diaries create a picture of daily phenomena by providing contemporaneous and detailed information about settings, events and reactions. The purpose of the network map is to gain insight into important social relationships, including the ways in which children and adolescents conceptualize their family relationships. In the life-line method, children are asked to mark on a line of life the most noteworthy turning points in their lives, whether positive or negative.

By what methods children’s life in their daily environments can be captured in an ecologically valid way? A method often used for capturing this kind of everyday life is the diary. Diaries create a picture of daily phenomena by providing contemporaneous and detailed information about settings, events and reactions. In this method, data are collected with repeated measurements during a limited time period, for example a week. Reports are made in close proximity to actual events in the participants’ natural environments. Recently, diary methods have been a focus of intensive development. Different forms of electronic diaries have replaced or at least complemented traditional paper-and-pencil diaries. Research methods employing the new technology may be found especially interesting by adolescents and children. Family Research Centre, University of Jyväskylä has contributed to this development work by creating a new tool, the mobile diary, for the study of everyday life (e.g. Rönkä et al., 2010 & 2015; Malinen et al., 2013; Sevón (forthcoming); Lämsä et al. 2013). In our project “Daily transitions, children in multiple family forms (DALFA)” special emphasis is on inventing methods to capture the everyday activities, daily emotions and social relationships of children living in different family forms with an innovative internet based method using voice and visual material.

Life-lines are said to be a reflexive and participatory method for studying changes, transitions and important life events in families. When studying children, such visual methods can, among other things, help break the ice in the interview and assist the child in memorizing and describing his/her life in a graphic form. In this presentation, I will discuss the use of life-lines as visual methods in a research project with children.

In the EMSE (Children’s emotional security in multiple family relations) -research project conducted in the Family Research Centre and funded by the Academy of Finland, we interviewed and collected life-lines from 44 children, mostly aged 11-13 years. We were interested in children’s perceptions of their family relations, changes that had taken place in these relations during the child’s life and their mood, whether positive or negative, during these transitions. In the beginning of the interview, the child was asked to mark important life-events, transitions and their mood at the time of events into a life-line. The interviewee assisted the child in drawing and marking by asking complementary questions. In the presentation, I will reflect in more detail the experiences, advantages and limitations of the life-line data.

Many changes are affecting the family today, transforming the foundations of self-identity, which are the core models for everyday personal life. The situation of family disruption raises a number of human and social issues which deserve to be better understood. The aim of this paper is to concentrate on the sociological consideration of the various bonds and transitions in children of divorce, with the use of innovative visual methods. This survey being carried out on a sample of young Italian adults, shows in the form of qualitative research the main features of one of these methods, the network maps. The network maps define the structure, the positions of family members and relationships between them, and conceptualize who belongs to a family that has changed. This throws some light on what family relationships, events and representations are on the perception of the person involved. The challenge posed for this visual method is to continue to conceive of individuals in terms of relational approach, through the interdependence with self, others, and the world during the course of life. A great contribution of this tool sui generis is that it opens the door to numerous additional questions that need answers and further research.

The starting point of the presentation is the assumption that experiences and memories – the everyday knowledge – deposits in the form of pictures: We are thinking in pictures. As a methodological consequence, we suggest that visual methods provide an outstanding, more immediate approach to understanding the constructions of everyday life world than verbal data. This is because implicit knowledge has to be more reflected to be presented verbally. An example for an more directly access to this implicit knowledge in private affairs is the use of toy figures and furniture in interviews to allow more practical demonstrations of social structures and social situations within the interview. Of course, this does not mean that verbal data is useless for such type of research, but rather that a huge potential lies in combining and triangulating verbal and visual data and in integrating visual methods into interview situations. This is especially true for research on subjects, which are highly ideologically charged, such as family issues.

Building upon a case study, we aim to explore the configuration in the inner space of one family. By drawing upon different types of pictures (family portraits, montages of everyday family life) as well as verbal data, we aim at working out inconsistencies and gaps between displaying and doing family. The presentation will finally discuss potentials of a combined approach of interviews and visualization techniques in the field of research on family and gender related issue.