Programme full

Poster Presentations
THURSDAY 16 APRIL 2015 15:00-15:30
This study argues that the cohorts of skilled migrants are heterogeneous and their pathways are significantly diverse.
Adequate insights regarding migrants' experiences on the UK labour market and beyond it are crucial for further
theorization of skilled migrants' careers.
This study employs semi-structured interviews with foreign professionals as the main source of data and examines
factors shaping international skilled careers at micro, meso and macro levels, including a variety of social, cultural,
political and economic influences in order to explore various interactions between agency and structures that affect
the career outcomes of skilled migrants. Critical realism has been adopted to identify powers shaping careers of
migrants and examine the role of context in shaping the execution of these powers.
The project is aimed to answer the following questions:
1). How are highly skilled migrants differentially engaged with their own social networks, and how does the nature of
this engagement affect career pathways through employment?
2). To what extent are social networks, as mechanisms that affect career trajectories, differentially embedded within
and affected by broader social structures (such as firms, industries, labour market and communities)?
POSTER 12
Exploring Older People’s Social Care Choices: Disentangling Notions of Choice and Care
Locke, P.
(Aston University)
Social care personal budgets aim to give older people control over the nature of their social care provision; however
changes to the criteria for eligibility now require many people to self-fund their care. A dialogical narrative analysis of
interviews with self-funders and their families explores their experience of making choices regarding personal care.
This paper considers the involvement of family members in such arrangements, whether that be in assisting to
arrange care or undertaking the care directly. There is a focus on the decisions made during the transition from
independence to dependence, the move from the 'third age' to the 'fourth age'. Rather than being a linear transition,
this is a period of fluctuating needs, so for example decisions may be made based on needs during an illness only to
be changed once the older person makes a recovery. Further, my research suggests that whilst care can be
something that is carefully planned, or 'chosen', equally it can also be something that just 'happens'. Moreover, an
older individual's loss of independence becomes a public issue when formal carers are introduced into the home.
Older people may resist such arrangements, seeking to keep their needs as private as possible. This resistance and
my research findings more broadly, highlight the fact that care is not always a matter of 'choice' in any straightforward
sense. Rather, in certain situations, particularly within families, care is something that is always present but is subject
to temporal and contextual fluctuations as the needs of individuals change.
POSTER 13
The Use of Visual Diaries to Elicit Insights into Everyday Life
Martin, W., Pilcher, K.
(Brunel University London)
Aspects of our everyday lives are habitual, taken for granted, and not often opened up for critical reflection. Habitual
practices of daily living do not require deliberation when experienced as 'natural' aspects of our localised social
worlds. This presents key methodological and theoretical complexities when researching daily lives. This paper draws
on the empirical study Photographing Everyday Life: Ageing, Bodies, Time and Space, funded by the ESRC, that
developed a participatory visual method to explore the daily lives of people as they grow older. The research involved
a diverse sample of 62 women and men aged 50 years and over who took photographs of their different daily routines
to create a weekly visual diary. This diary was then explored through in-depth photo-elicitation interviews to make
visible the rhythms, patterns and meanings that underlie habitual and routinised everyday worlds. This paper will
critically reflect on: (1) the limitations and possibilities for participants to capture their daily lives in visual diaries:
presence, absence, deletions; (2) representation, reflexivity and the portrayal of daily life: what can we 'know' from an
image?; and (3) the effective management and analysis of a large dataset (4471 photographs and 62 textual
transcripts): the use of ATLAS.ti tools to integrate visual and textual data and to combine different analytic approaches
to provide a holistic interpretation of the data. We conclude by reflecting on the extent to which the use of visual
diaries has been an effective method to elicit insights into daily lives.
51 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University