Making the Case for Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with LGBTGEQ+ Persons and Communities

ABSTRACT

The emergence of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in qualitative scholarship offers a means to derive in-depth meaning attending to the complexities of lived experience. IPA extends qualitative inquiry through a double hermeneutic whereby the researcher is making sense of the experiences of participants who are making sense of a phenomenon. In this article, the authors present seminal empirical studies using IPA with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender expansive, queer communities, argue a rationale for its usefulness, discuss methodological insights and strategies, and offer potential future directions.     

Demography and housing demand—what can we learn from residential construction data?

There are obvious reasons why residential construction should depend on the population’s age structure. We estimate this relation on Swedish time series data and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development panel data. Large groups of young adults are associated with higher rates of residential construction, but there is also a significant negative effect from those above 75. Age effects on residential investment are robust and forecast well out-of-sample in contrast to the corresponding house price results. This may explain why the debate around house prices and demography has been rather inconclusive. Rapidly aging populations in the industrialized world makes the future look bleak for the construction industry.

Evaluating school and parent reports of the national student achievement testing system (SIMCE) in Chile: Access,comprehension, and use

This evaluation examined school and parent reports of the national student achievement testing system (SIMCE) in Chile regarding three dimensions: access, comprehension, and use. We conducted phone surveys with a representative sample of directors (N = 375), teachers (N = 1145) and parents (N = 625), and we collected more in-depth data through interviews and focus groups in 16 of these schools. The results indicate that access to the reports is not an obstacle to use for school actors, but it is for parents. While summative ratings of the reports in terms of their clarity and utility were generally very positive, the actual recall and interpretation of even basic information (assessed through case scenarios) was incorrect for a majority of teachers and parents, and reported uses of the information were both intended and unintended in nature. We also found some statistically significant differences regarding comprehension and use among subgroups of our sample. Our findings are especially relevant given the expectations attached to the use of the reports for school improvement on the one hand, and parents’ behavior as critical consumers of education on the other hand.     

Health Promotion and Flexibility: Extending and Obscuring Power in Organizations

This paper explores the intersection between pursuits of improving organizational flexibility and pursuits of improving employees' health. It is argued that health promotion programmes have the potential of operating as mechanisms of power, which assist organizations in making up self-governing employees who flexibly adapt their lifestyles to the criteria of health and professional success. The paper shows how the fact that health promotion programmes are handled by 'independent' and legitimate health experts, and are provided to employees in the name of their health and well-being, obscures the forces of power in them, making them seem merely as informed ways of helping employees help themselves towards healthier and more successful lives. The paper concludes that health promotion programmes help to establish a new work ethic that challenges the boundary between work and private life. Furthermore, they make a healthy lifestyle part of the competencies that employees are responsible for developing and nurturing.     

Judgment aggregation without full rationality

Several recent results on the aggregation of judgments over logically connected propositions show that, under certain conditions, dictatorships are the only propositionwise aggregation functions generating fully rational (i.e., complete and consistent) collective judgments. A frequently mentioned route to avoid dictatorships is to allow incomplete collective judgments. We show that this route does not lead very far: we obtain oligarchies rather than dictatorships if instead of full rationality we merely require that collective judgments be deductively closed, arguably a minimal condition of rationality, compatible even with empty judgment sets. We derive several characterizations of oligarchies and provide illustrative applications to Arrowian preference aggregation and Kasher and Rubinstein’s group identification problem. This paper was circulated in August 2006 and presented at the Yale workshop on Aggregation of Opinions, September 2006, at the Centre interuniversitaire de rechere en économie quantitative, Montreal, October 2006, and at the 1st International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, Amsterdam, December 2006. We are grateful to the participants at these occasions and the anonymous referees for comments. We also thank Ton Storcken for discussion. Elad Dokow and Ron Holzman have independently proved closely related results, which were also presented at the Yale workshop in September 2006, and circulated in the December 2006 paper (Dokow and Holzman 2006).     

‘How to be a Happy Homosexual?!’ Non‐monogamy and Governmentality in Relationship Manuals for Gay Men in the 1980s and 1990s

This article explores discourses on non‐monogamy in relationship manuals published in the 1980s and 1990s for gay men from a perspective of governmentality. A distinctive feature of relationship manuals for gay men is the presentation of (non‐) monogamy as a matter of choice and negotiation. However, within this paradigm, most manuals problematise recreational, casual, or non‐relational sex or relationships with multiple partners through a set of discourses around the concepts intimacy, maturity, addiction and compulsion. The normative ideal of a successful gay male partnership is fleshed out in the provision of narrative schemata based on stage model theories which naturalise white middle class relationship experiences and concerns. Governmental rationality thereby enfolds itself in an interplay of several strategies including psychologisation, individualisation, normalisation, problematisation, and responsibilisation.