Strategies to Elicit and Analyze Relational Family Data

Abstract

Within the paradigm of qualitative methods of inquiry and data analysis are interesting avenues to address the complex task of capturing the family’s experience from a transactional viewpoint. The purposes of this article are to identify strategies for creating family-based data as well as to offer a theoretical discussion of how data analysis can attend to and enhance the knowledge base of the family experience. This discussion will be anchored within the description of an ongoing research study involving the examination of the process of parent-infant attachment. In this research, the processes of maternal and paternal attachments to their infants are regarded as co-constructed phenomena within the family environment. In this context, conceptualization of family interactional variables, strategies to elicit these variables, and paths to qualitative analysis of the data are presented.