Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges and possibilities involved in conducting interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research based on a six-year longitudinal study of youths’ livelihoods in East Africa. The project involved researchers trained in and drawing on a variety of disciplines and research paradigms. Interdisciplinary projects can produce productive tensions as the participants grapple with their different approaches, measures, and meanings. This chapter discusses points of tension faced by the team engaged in researching youths’ complex lives. These tensions pushed the researchers to work to understand each other—to take into account their own subject positions as researchers—across different disciplines and paradigms; if they had not done so, the research process would not have been so productive. The particular tensions discussed include: measuring and describing youths’ livelihoods; and conducting and interpreting interviews about youths’ lives. These tensions are particularly salient to research conducted in cross-cultural projects, where researchers are challenged to consider how they know what they know about youth.
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Notes
- 1.
David Chapman co-led the research project with me. Nancy Pellowski Wiger worked with us for nearly the length of the project. Other colleagues involved in the early years of the design included Aryn Baxter, Carol Carrier, and Heidi Eschenbacher; Chris Johnstone also worked with us throughout the duration of the project, leading the research in one country.
- 2.
I wish to thank all the researchers who contributed their insights and questions to the project. I particularly thank Laura Wangsness Willemsen and Nancy Pellowski Wiger for reflecting with me on the issues discussed in this chapter. I also wish to thank Acacia Nikoi, who worked with the project for six years and who offered assistance and insight in the final year as I was working on this chapter.
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DeJaeghere, J. (2021). Productive Tensions in Interdisciplinary and Mixed-Methods Research on Youths’ Livelihoods. In: Levison, D., Maynes, M.J., Vavrus, F. (eds) Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63632-6_6
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