Researching Home and Identity. Insights from an Educational Field Research

Since the end of the 1960s, the Department of Sociology of the University of Strasbourg established educational field research for students to learn doing research while being confronted to a thematic they are involved in. Several thematic are offered, and students may keep the same during several semesters, which enables them to build them as a sociologist through an expertise already since their undergraduate years. For teacher and researcher, this is a unique opportunity to transmit research methodologies, and reflect upon them while advising students researching. The “Housing, identity(ies) and work” educational field research was laugh in September 2017. Students may choose qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods according how they appropriate the thematic.

In this presentation, we conduct a mise en abyme analysis of housing and identity research. Indeed, we may first observe how students experience researching home in relation to identities: we conduct a meta-analysis of the various ways they enter in the field. Second, our analysis is also informed by own field research entering home in relation to the link between housing and identity(ies). The grounded-analysis aims to shed light on empirical research conditions and results in relation to researching home and identity at home.