Psychosocial presentation

1. Energy Practices and Psychosocial Research: The Energy
Biographies Study
Presentation at Association for Psychosocial Studies Conference, December 16-17th
2014,
Preston, Lancs, UK.
Professor Karen Henwood, Dr Chris Groves, Cardiff School of Social Sciences &
energy biographies team (www.energybiographies.org)

2. Research Problem & Context
• Complex, multiply framed problems in everyday living
posed to people, society, governments & international
community
• Transitioning toward socio-environmental sustainability
– liveable change (energy biographies) not
accelerationism (Noys, 2014)
• Decarbonisation through Carbon Conversations
(Randall, 2009; www.carbonconversations .org)
• Energy practices & everyday life

3. Practice Theory and Psychosocial Concerns
Practice Theory Psychosocial concerns
• Social theory/STS/sociology of
everyday practice
• Draws on theoretical work on
social practices (Reckwitz, 2002,
Schatzki, 1996)
• Wider energy systems made up of
interlocking elements of practice
(materials, knowledge, meaning)
• Change in one element provokes
change in other elements & the
practice itself (Shove et al, 2012)
• Addresses questions of individual
agency as emergent property of
particular sets of practices
• Brings into focus analytically distinct foci
(elements) to behaviours & practice theory:
• - biographically constituted attachments,
investments
• - fragmented, multiple, contradictory,
identities- reflecting self-other relations
(difference & connection)
• - identifications, introjected cultural ideals;
splitting, projection
• - shared meanings, commitments, beliefs &
values, world-views
• - what is not expressed/unspoken/difficult
to put into words - the non-cognitive -
feelings, emotions, affect (eg anxiety,
shame, loss)
• - libidinal forces – wishes, wants and
desires
• - intangible aspects of subjectivity –but
gaining meaning through sense-making &
take up of subject positions, as part of
cultural discourses

4. An empirical study: the energy
biographies’ temporal and biographical
approach
• QLL facilitates an exploration of change through time
and an accumulation of data, which provides depth and
detail
• How past experiences and anticipated futures come to
have an impact – both enabling & constraining – on
people’s present lives, routines and habits
• Individual biographical accounts can
• shed light on wider social trends and
changes

5. Case Sites
www.energybiographies.org

6. Sample details
• Wave 1 – 68 interviews with 74 participants (34 men and
40 women) aged 14 to 80, a range of employment,
relationship and household circumstances.
• Wave 2 & 3 (Longitudinal) – 36 participants (18 men and
18 women) aged 18 to 70.
• Transitions during the course of the study – employment
status change, relationship breakdown, bereavement,
house move, health issues, household composition change,
changes to travel practices, building work.

7. Wave 1 interviews – themes
1. Community and Context
• Talk through how they came to live in their current
home/area, how they characterise their community(s)
• Connections – e.g. who they live with/is in their family
• Discussion points specific to the particular case area
2. Daily routine
• Talk through in detail to get an understanding of energy
use and practices
• Discuss how this varies for atypical times/events
e.g. Christmas, weekends
3. Life transitions
• What have been the key events/turning points that have
resulted in a lifestyle change?
• How might lifestyles and transitions differ for future
generations?

8. Activity 1 – participant-generated photos
1. Activity 1 – participant-generated photos
• Participants were asked to take photographs of things they felt were related to
energy use around four themes
• Two week period for each theme. Participants were sent texts to remind them
of the theme
• Pictures then formed the basis for discussion in interview 2
Jack: That’s a tumble dryer timer so you can control the heat and the time, I’m
very aware of using the tumble dryer, I don’t use it very often, in fact just lately
I’ve hardly used it at all … I just put the stuff over the clothes horse and then the
ambient temperature of the house dries the clothes or I put them outside on the
line and I love pegging washing out, it’s one of my favourite things …
Int: And what is it about pegging washing out?
Jack: I don’t know but my mum has it so maybe it’s something I’ve picked up off
her … just the ease, the ease and the ability to just have such an easy, to create
clean washing is such a hard task and it’s just fantastic to do it, maybe, maybe in
the distant past my relatives were in domestic service and had to struggle,
washing is a real struggle if you don’t have modern gadgets so every time I do it I
really appreciate it.

9. Wave 2 interviews - themes
Example:
There are a few themes emerging from the first interviews which I would like to
ask your views on:
Wasting energy – what is seen as wasteful? Is it only seen as wasteful in a
financial sense? Have you noticed anything around the home/workplace/out
and about that you consider wasteful? Is there anything you would do to
change this?
Second interview – a detailed focus on everyday energy use
• Discussion of important life changes since interview 1
• Exploring everyday energy use through participant-
generated photographs
• Following up emerging themes from interview 1: e.g. waste,
frugality and guilt

10. Activity 2 – text-prompted photos
Activity 2 – text-prompted photos
• Text messages sent to participants at 10 intervals between
August-November 2012 asking them to take a picture of
what they were doing at the time
• From these pictures we created photo narratives, to be
discussed with participants in interview 3

11. Wave 3 interviews - themes
Third interview – looking to energy futures
• Discussion of important life changes since interview 2
• Exploring everyday routines through text-prompted
photos and using these to facilitate discussions of pasts
and futures
• Using videos to discuss visions of the future
Example:
Since last time we spoke (in August) have you experienced any
changes/anything happened that has led to change in your life? (Prompt
impact for lifestyle changes) Have there been any alterations in your day-to-
day life/routine? (Follow up on specific issues from interview 1/2). Has this
resulted in any changes to your energy use?

12. Activity 3 - videos
Activity 3 – video clips
• During interview 3 participants are shown clips from a 1950s and 2010s version
of what a home of the future might look like
• The clips facilitate talk about the future, which can otherwise be difficult to
discuss

13. Theorising the Practice-Psychosocial
Interface in the Energy Biographies Study
• Patterns of practices in and of themselves cannot be viewed as responsible for the
continuance of unsustainability; our ways of going on being are not exhausted
practical, embodied consciousness – multiple forms make up up the fabric of
everyday life
• Need to go deeper and broader in thinking about people as carriers of practice;
becoming recruited to such practices, remaining loyal to – or defecting from practices
as a result of the internal rewards from participation in practice
• Internal rewards in practice theory are competences afforded by doing something
well, or by performing a practice in accordance with social norms & cultural
distinctions
• But, a psychosocial perspective offers complex views of the various other elements
that lock in, or fail to lock in, subjects as carriers of particular practices – and opens
up possibilities of change in and through time

14. Psychosocial theory as a perspective on everyday energy
use and practice change
Analytically distinct elements (e.g. biographies of attachments) and
other psychosocial investments (e.g. shared affective patterning)
derive from – but that cannot be reduced to - social relations
Understood psychosocially, all are viewed emergent & dynamic
properties of lived experience, situated in time and place
Sense making activities (e.g. about biographical patterning of
experiences and connections/attachments in and through time)
contribute to cultural shaping of forms of subjectivity
Well equipped to understand embedding of psychosocial
elements/subjects within particular cultural formations (knowledge
regimes/discourses) in specific ways

15. Data Extract 1 – Heating the Outdoors
(Lucy, Peterson SuperEly)
• … we do love our patio heater when it’s a sunny evening but it gets a
bit cold and dark and you can sit out and they’re like probably the
worst things aren’t they? But we love it well we only use it about
five times a year so it’s OK.
• Cos we love being outside, we just love that you can you know go, we
were sitting out there one evening … it was like midnight and you
could have a drink outside still and it’s so lovely here cos it’s so quiet
and everything so but you wouldn’t have been able to do it without
that so or you would have been freezing. So that’s our kind of, we
know it’s really bad but we’re still going to use it.

16. Analytic narrative
• Psycho-biographical connection to practice :
• - involves renewal of identity tied to family connections
• - desire for ideal home – centring on surroundings and possibilities
afforded for hosting family and friends
• Participation in the practice derives from internal rewards
contributed to identity - constituted by emotional investments & by
evaluations of how life is going for them and for people who matter
to them (relational rewards)
• Expansion of psychosocial - emotional & symbolic: space is one
where engagement in unsustainable practice nonetheless plays a
sustaining role

17. Data Extract 2 – Cycling to Work (Sara,
London – Royal Free)
• So I cycle there and back…. when my daughter was young I had a seat on
the back for her and cycled as much as I could…. It’s just quicker to get to
work, it’s so much quicker…. So it was convenience as well and obviously I
wanted to try and get fit and yes, it just seemed like, they’ve introduced an
underground sort of cage where you use your pass to get in. So it’s quite a
secure bike lock up. So once I knew they had that I was more inclined to…
And my mum always cycled when I was young, I always remember being on
the back of her bike in Dublin. So yes, and when we lived in the countryside
in Ireland, I cycled to school two miles each way because there were no
buses. So yes, it’s just something that’s always been there.
• I cycled to Hampstead yeah in my old job which was a lot nicer because you
cycle through Hampstead Heath but here it’s Central London, it’s Euston,
it’s really really busy and I’m quite scared about because we don’t have
decent cycle lanes at all. So just have to be really careful.

18. Analytic narrative
• Cycling has practical advantages for commuting - but deeper value
lies in connecting it to her environment, especially the community
in which she lives, her mother, connections between home &
workplace
• Internal rewards come from attachment to practice and to objects
with shared/community meaning and private meanings
• Such meanings are tangibly linked through biographical narrative to
negotiating issues of vulnerability, identity and self-efficacy
• Cycling’s psychosocial value derives from attachments to practices
that, even while going through transitions, can afford connection
and relational rewards

19. Extract 3 – Driving Souped Up Old Cars
(Ronald, Peterson)
•I would have no wish to rally in a modern in a modern car, whichever engine it was
propelled by, no wish at all. It would be quite good fun to drive balls out in the most
recent Mini, just to see what it was like through a forest, I would enjoy that yes please! …
but that would be a novelty; it wouldn't be what turns me on. What turns me on is a
piece of old kit that you've put together and you've developed and, you know, the cars I
have are not just reconstructed but I've developed them as you would have developed
them from original. They are not an original but they do stuff that they couldn't do when
they were first built. ... That's the appeal for me; you've done this, you've put it together,
you and your chum, its adventure, more than motorsport in a sense … the adventure bit
is every much as important as the mechanical bit but both are important…. so I wouldn't
want to do that in a battery-powered car or a hydrogen car or a modern car, wouldn't
want to do it and it wouldn't turn me on

20. Analytic Narrative
• Driving, central to identity, centring on cars as specific
material objects
• Car-care an activity of comradeship, autonomy
connected with risk experience
• Oil depleted/imagined future unable to support shared
meanings of adventure – an internal reward of
participation in risk practice
• Imaginatively, loss of attachment through leisure driving
is anticipated for multiple generations

21. Extract 4 – Home freezing (Lucy, Peterson
SuperEly)
• I think they’re necessary but I think we’re all a bit obsessed, like I
think when people have two freezers like my mother-in-law has a
chest freezer and she doesn’t know what half the stuff in there is and
I was talking about this with a friend and they said they cleared out
their grandmother’s freezer once with her and there were things that
had been in there for like eight years that she’s like made and dated,
… I think it also results in a way of wasting more food because you
go oh I’ll just shove it in the freezer but actually you never end up
using it or you end up chucking it out because it’s been in there too
long or whatever so. I think it’s a necessary thing that we’ve taken,
we’ve become a bit over the top obsessed with you know.

22. Analytic narrative
• Food freezing practices allows management of
conflicting time pressures, but unspoken valuing of
household security hinted at as constitutive of identity
• Early biographical experiences made sense of home
freezers as enabling ‘escape’ from known times of
generational hardship – giving emotional & symbolic &
identity significance to participation in specific batch
cooking & quick meals
• Obsession defensively evokes seeking security through
practice & its inherently unsustainable dynamic –
increasing waste & energy use to maintain full freezers

23. Concluding remarks
• Qualitative data analysis – substantive theory
building?
• What is being made visible?
• Policy implications?

24. Energybiographies.org
Other team Members:
Professor Nick Pidgeon & Dr Fiona Shirani (Cardiff),
Dr Karen Parkhill (now Bangor, from 2015 York)
Dr Catherine Butler (now Exeter)