Title

Ritual, Children, and the Qualitative Researcher

Location

1053

Format Type

Event

Format Type

Paper

Start Date

January 2018

End Date

January 2018

Abstract

I am currently engaged in two projects that tap into the same experience: participating in the communion ritual of the Eastern Orthodox Church. One project is a hermeneutic phenomenological study of young children’s experience taking communion. I will finish interviews with the children early this summer. As data collection proceeds, I am journaling about my observations and reactions to the children’s answers and nonverbal communication as we discuss and create art about the ritual. The other project is extensive journaling about my own experience of participating in the rite, which I had planned to (and may still) use for an autoethnography on trauma and communion. I have been keeping this journal for over a year. In addition to writing about my own experiences as a communicant, I also have entries that respond to scholarly work on various links between interpersonal trauma, eating behavior, relationship quality, and religion.

For the 2018 TQR conference, I propose speaking on how both of these projects are impacting me as a researcher in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains, and how these effects in turn promise to influence my continued work in studying the experience of faith-based ritual from a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective. The content of this talk will be based on an analysis of both journals mentioned above, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009), and further reflection on how the effects of these projects are influencing my decisions about specific topics of and methods in future research.

Comments

Reference:

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method, and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Jan 11th, 1:15 PM Jan 11th, 1:35 PM

Ritual, Children, and the Qualitative Researcher

1053

I am currently engaged in two projects that tap into the same experience: participating in the communion ritual of the Eastern Orthodox Church. One project is a hermeneutic phenomenological study of young children’s experience taking communion. I will finish interviews with the children early this summer. As data collection proceeds, I am journaling about my observations and reactions to the children’s answers and nonverbal communication as we discuss and create art about the ritual. The other project is extensive journaling about my own experience of participating in the rite, which I had planned to (and may still) use for an autoethnography on trauma and communion. I have been keeping this journal for over a year. In addition to writing about my own experiences as a communicant, I also have entries that respond to scholarly work on various links between interpersonal trauma, eating behavior, relationship quality, and religion.

For the 2018 TQR conference, I propose speaking on how both of these projects are impacting me as a researcher in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains, and how these effects in turn promise to influence my continued work in studying the experience of faith-based ritual from a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective. The content of this talk will be based on an analysis of both journals mentioned above, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009), and further reflection on how the effects of these projects are influencing my decisions about specific topics of and methods in future research.