Jen Lyttleton-Smith

The conditions of COVID-19 revealed inadequacies in well-being support for unpaid carers in Wales. We explore qualitative data, generated in 2021, regarding the importance of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction in unpaid carers’ lives; both for carers’ individual well-being and for their relationship with the person cared for. Discussions of activities restricted or prohibited during the pandemic were revealing about the nature and significance of pleasure within caring relationships. We distinguish between hedonia—transient moments of fun, amusement, or sensory pleasure—and eudaimonia—activities that align with and enact a person’s ethical or personal values—to explore what helps to make caring arrangements sustainable. Unlike Aristotle’s conception of hedonia as vulgar and shallow, we recognize that moments of shared joy play an essential role in supporting the dyadic relationship of carer and person cared for, and that moments of enjoyment away from caring can also uphold the carer’s sense of identity. An absence of ‘joy’ in life is therefore likely to be detrimental to carers’ well-being, also creating barriers to eudaimonic well-being. For practice, it is important that strengths-based approaches recognize the importance of hedonic opportunities to support well-being and prevent carer burn-out.

This article reports the findings from a qualitative study evaluating a Visiting Mum scheme that supported Welsh children with a mother in prison. There are 12 women’s prisons in England, and none in Wales. Women living in south and west Wales are currently incarcerated at HMP Eastwood Park, Gloucestershire. This is significant for Welsh children, as journeys to the prison are extensive and costly. This article focuses on the rarely heard experiences of the children when visiting prison. We ran focus groups with 12 children utilising innovative, participatory and creative methods. The findings reveal a hidden population of children who suffer disproportionately as a result of their mother’s incarceration but who were effectively supported by a service which helped to sustain mother–child relationships during their mothers' imprisonment.

(2019). Legally straight: sexuality, childhood, and the cultural value of marriage. Journal of Gender Studies: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 491-492.

The study of marginalia has not been widely discussed in social sciences research and occupies a marginal space in terms of methodological legitimacy. We highlight the value of paying attention to the ways in which participants speak back to the researcher. This paper draws on marginalia found in surveys written or drawn by young people in classrooms across South Wales, demonstrating how various notes and marks made spontaneously by participants can tell us something important and worthwhile about how young people engage with research. We position marginalia as a manifestation of complex power dynamics in the research process that illuminate participants’ negotiation of complex and multiple subjectivities in the literal margins and between the lines of the survey pages. Whilst the sensitive and rigorous analysis of marginalia is fraught with ethical and methodological challenges, we argue that paying closer attention to marginalia presents an opportunity for deeper engagement with participants when undertaking survey research.

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and ‘groupishness’ of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology.

Is your nursery space working for or against gender diversity? Dr Jen Lyttleton-Smith examines why promoting gender diversity and avoiding stereotypical roles is important when working with young children, and how settings can change their practice and environment for the better

This qualitative research paper discusses how the material environment of preschool classrooms contributes to early childhood experiences of gender. It applies poststructuralist and posthumanist concepts – primarily Barad’s agential-realism – to analyse ethnographic data extracts drawn from the author’s semi-longitudinal study in a UK nursery. This data focuses on two specific areas of the classroom, the ‘home corner’ and the ‘small world’, and the paper argues that these areas and the objects contained within them can support or challenge/queer gender roles depending on temporal material-discursive conditions. It concludes with specific thinking points for practitioners, arguing that applying these theoretical concepts to explore gender in the early years produces interesting perspectives on how rigid, binary gender roles can be challenged effectively in non-discursive ways within classrooms.

We describe the Imitation Game, a new research method that collects both qualitative and quantitative data, and which can be used as a mixed methods procedure in many disciplines. Drawing on two projects, one investigating gender, the other sexuality, we show that the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the Game combine in four different ways, from more quantitative to more qualitative, involving increasing cultural understanding by the researchers. Crucially, deep cultural input is initially supplied by the players of the Game, who act as “proxy researchers,” enabling data to be gathered quickly and efficiently. The analysis has its roots in sociology of scientific knowledge and studies of expertise and experience, hence the emphasis on the cultural foundations of methods and the nature of expertise.