Research projects

Projects from Morgan Centre members

Dating app connections

Intimacies before, during and after Covid

This project will examine lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans (LGBT+) and heterosexual people's use of online dating apps to negotiate intimacy during and after Covid 19 lockdowns and social distancing.  

We will explore how people used dating apps to start or maintain relationships (including sexual and romantic relationships, and friendships) and how these relationships affect personal resilience. Our data will help us understand how apps can support our emotional and personal needs, and whether they can offer a safer way to be intimate with others at times of high viral risk. 

We will investigate the different ways in which LGBT and heterosexual people's intimate lives have been affected by the social restrictions linked to the pandemic. Can dating apps be a place for new kinds of intimacy, and does this in turn help users be more resilient in difficult times? And do apps encourage or discourage behaviour that increases viral risk. 

Funder

This project, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Ref: ES/W002426/1) and runs from May 2022 to September 2024.

Girlhood and Later Life

Transitions and Mobilities: Girls growing up in Britain 1954-76 and the implications for later-life experience and identity

This generation of women has immense historical and current significance. In their teens and early twenties these women were in the vanguard of postwar social change. Now they are part of the largest group of over 60s in British history with unprecedented influence on politics, public services and commerce. They are redefining ageing and making new demands on, and contributions to, society. This pioneering approach to later life is widely believed to be shaped partly by this generation’s experiences of growing up in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

This is the first detailed study of girls growing up in the 1950s to 1970s and the implications for later life. It explores:

  • the lives of young women from different backgrounds in Britain 1954-76;
  • the implications of the youth of these women for their experience and identities in later life.

Visit the Girlhood and Later Life website.

Funder

The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Sketching research

October 2015 to July 2016

Project summary

Lynne Chapman is an urban sketcher and illustrator who was Artist in Residence at the Morgan Centre during 2015/16. She documented the life and work of the centre, and worked with us to explore the similarities between sketching and qualitative research in the ways they interpret and represent everyday lives. Lynne produced her own sketches and worked with Morgan Centre staff to test the potential of the use of sketching in their own research.

Publications

  • Observational sketching as method - Sue Heath, Lynne Chapman and the Morgan Centre Sketchers. Article in International Journal of Social Research Methodology Volume 21, 2018 - Issue 6.
  • The art of the ordinary - Sue Heath and Lynne Chapman. Chapter in Mundane Methods: Innovative ways to research the everyday (Eds Helen Holmes and Sarah Marie Hall), Manchester University Press, 2020. 

Contact

Project leader: Sue Heath

Funder

The project was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence grant.

Facet methodology

Facet Methodology is a new model for mixed-method approaches to research.

The gemstone is the research question and facets are conceived as different methodological-substantive planes and surfaces.

Designed to be capable of casting and refracting light that helps to define the concern by creating flashes of insight.

Background

Facet Method grew from our interest in personal relationships, relationalities, and how they are lived.

It was developed as a collaborative process between Morgan Centre members. Particularly the research teams working on our Critical Associations and Living Resemblances projects.

About facet methodology

It assumes that the world - and what we seek to understand about it - is not only lived and experienced but is multi-dimensional, contingent, relationally implicated and entwined.

Facets involve different lines of enquiry and different ways of seeing. The approach creates a set of facets in relation to specific research concerns and questions.

For example, in our Living Resemblances project, we researched how people make sense of, and live with, family resemblances.

We designed a project which used a series of facets including:

  • creative interview encounters around questions about the living of resemblances in family life;
  • experimental methods exploring how resemblances are perceived in a variety of contexts;
  • a small set of 'expert' interviews;
  • a photoshoot combined with 'vox pops' to observe the performance of resemblances in public.

Facets are mini investigations that focus on strategically and artfully selected sets of questions. Facets are not discrete topics of study or mini sub-studies which are part of a bigger study. Nor are they mixes of methods (even though mixing methods is often involved).

Facets aim to produce telling insights, rather than give a comprehensive descriptive knowledge. Our approach differs from mixed methods which aim to triangulate or integrate data. Facets cast light on each other, we can also change what we see by how we look at them.

The rigour of the approach comes from researcher skill, inventiveness, creativity, insight and imagination. To carve the facets so that they catch the light in the best possible way.

Publications and outputs

For a more detailed discussion of facet methodology, the best place to start is:

Research team

  • Facet Methodology was developed by colleagues at the Morgan Centre. Led by Jennifer Mason, with Katherine Davies, Carol Smart, Brian Heaphy, Vanessa May, Sue Heath, Stewart Muir and James Nazroo.