The Methodological Potential of Scrapbooking: Theory, Application, and Evaluation

Abstract

The methodological possibilities of scrapbooking have hitherto been largely neglected in social science research. This article provides much needed theoretical and empirical insights into its potential, positing it as a practical and conceptual process of saving, sharing, and making sense(s) of the everyday and ephemeral. Scrapbooking highlights both the contingency and partiality of the scraps themselves and its own performance of giving them form. Research into how women experience and interpret ‘men’s intrusions’ over the course of 1 week put these ideas into practice. The study used both physical and digital scrapbooks, for which the social media platform Tumblr was employed. An evaluation of scrapbooking’s methodological potential produced three characteristic ‘tensions’: between freedom and constraint, between the raw and the processed, and between the therapeutic and the intrusive. These three tensions necessitate further exploration.