Most Treasured Things (Qualitative research/arts-based inquiry essay for MAIS 640) 

By the time I entered the final leg of my MA-IS journey, I had accepted that I am a researcher/storyteller rather than an archivist. But I still wanted to find a way to navigate the physical materials in my basement. Grounded theory, an exploratory qualitative research methodology, provided a way to go deeper into my archives. It offered a hands-on and systematic approach to cataloguing my materials through a process called coding. I started to view them as a “body of data,” an impartial description that caused me to feel less pressure. 

Nevertheless, I continued to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things in my basement and feared it would take me years to appropriately code everything. Fortunately, my instructor talked me through my overwhelm and gently pushed me in the direction of my great-grandmother Marjorie’s book of poems, which once again surfaced while I practiced my new coding skills. 

Instead of trying to code everything in my basement, for the purposes of this project I focused on coding a selection of poems from her book. I also gathered other pieces of her life: a series of photos from her infancy, youth, and adulthood; letters that she had received from her many friends; letters she had written to her daughters; and her journals from the last seven years of her life (1934-1940). 

Even though I had all these materials, there were still many things I didn’t know; I had to fill in the gaps. Once I’d rounded up and coded the materials, I set out to use a life history approach to build Marjorie’s life story. I attempted to do a creative interpretation of her life, but once I started writing, it felt forced. Instead, I found narrative and arts-based inquiry methods to be more authentic.  

Narrative inquiry “records the experiences of an individual or small group, revealing the lived experience or particular perspective of that individual, usually primarily through interview which is then recorded and ordered into a chronological narrative” (Qualitative Study Design: Narrative Inquiry, n.d.). Since my subjects are long-deceased and I’m not able to conduct interviews, I turned to arts-based methods, in particular poetry, for my research and inquiry. Woods and Sikes (2022) highlight poetry as a strategy “for arranging familiar elements in an unfamiliar way” (Hewitt, as quoted in Woods and Sikes, p. 101). 

This gave me the opportunity to use the poems that I developed in MAIS 621 and explore them with another lens. The poems became less of a narrative exercise and more of a vehicle for “dialogue” with Marjorie. They were a place to explore my feelings around ancestry, legacy, and a person whom I’ve only known through stories and words.  

Grounded theory is a method to build a theory from “the ground up,” and my research coalesced into a theory around Marjorie’s life. I’d heard many stories from my family about her sensitive and artistic nature, the times she’d retreat from the family to focus on her art, and her frequent illnesses.  

I had always suspected that Marjorie’s mysterious illnesses were depression. Through analyzing her poems and her journals, I attempted to substantiate this theory. While her poems focused on faith, nature, and family, her notebooks detailed her health problems, including many days where she was unable to get out of bed, extended hospital stays, and frequent references to feeling “blue” or “under the weather.” 

Without proper health records or a formal diagnosis, I could not make a solid conclusion about the mental health of a person who died 85 years ago. This arts-based inquiry allowed me to fill in the gaps and reconstruct the narrative of her life through poetry. I crafted a story about my great-grandmother and myself, her efforts to make herself known to me, and how I conversed with her through poetry while I was digging up her life’s work in my musty old basement. 

This project was truly interdisciplinary and fused together three research methods. Grounded theory made it possible to analyze my data and build a theory. Narrative inquiry allowed me to construct the story of my journey and make meaning out of the materials left behind by previous generations. An arts-based inquiry (writing poetry) allowed for creative theory building, as I let my imagination fill in the details and have conversations across time and distance. 

References (APA 7 style) 

Deakin University Library. (n.d.). Qualitative study design: Narrative inquiry. https://deakin.libguides.com/qualitative-study-designs/narrative-inquiry 

Woods, P., & Sikes, P. (2022). Successful writing for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Routledge.