Social Research Methods and Research Practices > Social Research Methods
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Background:
Evidence suggests that transitioning to motherhood at a younger age is associated with higher levels of cardiovascular biomarker risk factors later in life. While early-life confounding factors alongside social and behavioural pathways contribute to this association, residual confounding may remain.
Objective:
To investigate the relationship between age at first childbirth and later life cardiovascular biomarker risk factors (BMI, android/gynoid fat ratio, blood pressure, lipid profile), and environmental and genetic confounding in female twins.
Participants and setting:
Participants were 2,204 mothers from the TwinsUK cohort (549 di-, 553 monozygotic twin pairs) who were 50 years or older and had data on age at first birth, at least one outcome, and selected covariates.
Methods:
Generalised estimation equations were used to analyse (1) individual-level crude associations of age at first birth with the outcomes, (2) di- and monozygotic between and within-family estimates, and (3) covariate-adjusted associations.
Results:
Individual-level analyses suggest that women with age at first birth <20 years (compared to 25–29 years) had higher mean BMI, android/gynoid fat ratio, and triglyceride levels after age 50. However, confidence intervals were wide. Considering within-family estimates, effect size reductions suggest partial confounding by early environmental factors, with associations for android/gynoid fat ratio persisting.
Conclusion:
Family-level confounding plays a role in the link between age at first birth and cardiovascular biomarker risk factors. Age at first birth <20 may be associated with increased cardiovascular biomarker risk. Larger representative and/or twin studies are needed to assess these findings’ significance, robustness to confounding, and specific pathways.
Chapter four looks at i-doc aesthetics, showing how designing aesthetic features can help researchers to focus on dimensions of affect, mood, atmosphere, emotion, and feeling in their topics. It also examines how aesthetic design for i-docs, as a mode of encountering the world, can do important work of illuminating entanglements of moods and affects at different scales, revealing how localised moods and affects connect to more pervasive structures of feeling. The chapter explores this by focusing on the i-docs The Lockdown Game and The Temporary City.
Chapter 6 focuses on co-creative processes of i-doc making, arguing for the value of i-docs as a participatory and activist method. The chapter explores how i-doc making can create shared worlds without homogenising differences and can counter ‘epistemic injustice’ by allowing publics to co-create knowledge that might contest dominant narratives. It also suggests that i-docs can tell stories with multiple heroes, emphasising collaboration over conflict. It focuses on The Lockdown Game as a participatory i-doc project and 18 Days in Egypt and Athens Report as activist i-docs.
Interactive documentaries, or i-docs, are web based, multimedia documentaries that immerse audiences through dynamic, interactive platforms. This book unlocks the value of i-docs as a creative research method, providing an engaging guide on how to use i-docs to examine and communicate research subjects.
With examples, conceptual discussion, and practical advice, the book explores how i-docs can illuminate topics including temporalities, power and space, affect and feeling, freedom, and epistemic justice. The book addresses i-docs as a digital form but also shows that even just planning an i-doc on paper can open up new analytical perspectives.
Key features of the book include:
- An easy to use template for planning your own i-doc;
- Advice on how researchers can ‘think with i-docs’ without even producing one;
- Discussion of methodological work with i-docs including participatory i-doc making;
Insights into a range of examples of commercial, activist and research i-docs from around the world.
This book is a valuable resource for scholars, students, community researchers, creatives and activists who want to enlist and ignite the possibilities of i-docs.
Chapter 5 shows how designing the interactive capacities of i-docs can focus attention on issues of freedom and compliance while inviting both researchers and audiences to consider their own complicity and agency in research topics. While i-docs, as a non-linear medium, are often associated with openness and potential, the chapter emphasises how i-docs are defined as much by what’s fixed as by what’s open and as much by frustrations of agency as by invitations to act. The chapter focuses on The Lockdown Game as well as briefly exploring several other i-docs.
Chapter 1 introduces i-docs as a creative method. It places i-docs in a lineage of creative technologies that have, across history, reformulated human perception, and it argues that researchers can deliberately harness i-docs to develop and engage the new ways of seeing that are crucial when addressing contemporary challenges in society. It argues that the interactive, multi-perspectival, and co-creative capacities of i-docs can help us to untangle complex trajectories of multiple entangled crises, see avenues for connection and collaboration, and create shared visions that accommodate differences.
Chapter three explores how designing the spatial infrastructures of i-docs – the layout of their pages and of content within those pages – can shed light on the ways that power dynamics are embedded spatially. I-docs can illuminate power dynamics that relate to spatial markings – for example, borders, boundaries, locations, and routes. They can also expose politicised tensions in how different people imagine and navigate space and problematise relationships between mobility and fixity. The chapter focuses on the i-docs Gaza Sderot, Refugee Republic, and The Lockdown Game.
Chapter two addresses the ‘temporal architectures’ of i-docs. Temporal architecture is a term developed by Sarah Sharma that draws attention to the politics of temporal systems, including the unequal valuing of different people’s time. This chapter will show how i-doc making has helped me to interrogate and analyse the politics of time with precision as well as critique disciplinary assumptions and convictions about temporality. The chapter focuses on the i-doc The Temporary City as well as A Journal of Insomnia, Hollow, and The Last Generation.
Chapter 7 shows how the modes of encounter developed through i-doc making can be extracted from the process of creating a digital interface. This way, the value of i-docs as a method can be more widely taken up and used by researchers. The chapter provides a practical template for how you can ‘think’ with i-docs that can be used by readers in their own research. It also suggests user-friendly platforms that enable low-tech and low-budget experiments with i-doc making.