Research methods for practices in transition

Abstract

Since the so-called practice turn and over the past 25 years, empirical research in geography and many other disciplines has increasingly concentrated on sustainable practices to contribute to the broader discussion on sustainable development. Scholarly interest has focused on the practices that make up the social, trying to unpack the patterns of recognisable and repetitive actions that constitute people’s everyday routines of life. Diverse authors worked on conceptualising practice and operationalisation schemes to frame and guide the study of practices in different arenas. Relatively recent are, however, critical reflections on appropriate research methodologies to capture a practice’s different dimensions: sayings, doings, and materiality. Research methods naturally qualify for a specific spatial expression, i.e. (participant) observation to study functional articulations (doings), interviews to study discursive articulations (sayings), and surveys to study physical articulations (materiality). By combining different methods into a sound methodology, practice research has established, for example, retrospective studies on user behaviour in mobility, housing, and working to investigate, among other things, the energy footprint of everyday practices and the transition to a sustainable lifestyle. However, there needs to be more robust agreement on research designs for prospective studies that attempt to capture practices in emerging social phenomena of onset or ongoing transition. This paper explores how methods from citizen science, action research, and design can enrich the traditional panoply of scientific methods in social practice research to capture emerging phenomena and transitions.