Doing Institutional Ethnography in International Contexts: reflections on a research study in four EU countries

This paper is based on a two-year Institutional Ethnography (Smith, 1987, 1990, 2005, 2006) in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the UK. The STRESS-Mums research study (Tartari, 2019) concerns the legal transition from double to single parenting. Through in-depth interviews, the research investigates from the standpoint of lone mothers how legal institutions and professionals shape the mothers’ phase of transition from double to single parenting. Then, through interviews to the double, the research involves legal professionals and gender activists and asks them for explaining how they read and interpret the legal texts translating them into a language that fits the needs of the mothers. This IE allows illustrating how texts’ interpretations, translations, and discourses (Manicom and Campbell 1995) shape the everyday life of lone mothers during and after that legal transition.

Conducting an IE in different countries presents many challenges and opportunities to develop new reflections on how IE as a theory and as a method can be utilized in international comparative research studies focusing, at the same time, on the local and translocal dimensions. How to select countries, how to select, contact and interview participants, how to manage and consider the culture and language differences, how to interpret and compare mothers’ experiences analyzing texts, processes, and discourses in different countries are some of the challenges that this paper discusses.

The STRESS-Mums research project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement no 843976.

This paper was presented at the 2021 European Sociological Association (ESA) Congress.