Explicating articulations: intentions and intonations in researching the voices of retired Australians

Explicating articulations: intentions and intonations in researching the voices of retired Australians

If researchers are to listen attentively to the voices of research participants, they need to be able to explicate those participants' diverse articulations of lived experiences and multiple realities. At the same time, they inevitably bring their own perspectives to bear in designing their studies and analysing the utterances that they record. This intersection of intentions and intonations of research participants and researchers alike is crucial if complex and sometimes competing understandings of the world are to be vocalised in ethically engaged ways.
This proposition is illustrated by the authors' conceptually framed reflections on conducting research with members of a retirement village in Queensland, Australia. The study was a single site, qualitative case study designed to elicit participants' engagements with the phenomenon of retirement, informed by contemporary scholarship on mobilities and performativity that emphasises human agency against the backdrop of broader sociocultural forces related to work and recreation.
The analysis of the study's findings highlights themes of adaptation, resistance and uncertainty by the participating retirees in creating new lives for themselves in a new community. These themes give analytical priority to the participants' intentions in enacting that creation, and the researchers in turn assign methodological weight to eliciting the intonations attending the articulation of those intentions.
Simultaneously the researchers' own intentions and intonations receive attention, given their function in framing the explication of the articulation of the participants' voices, which sometimes find echoes in the authors' perspectives and at other times set up potential discordances. This outcome both derives from and extends beyond one researcher's dual role as a member of the research team and as a resident of the retirement village. More broadly, the authors ponder possible implications for enhancing the effective and ethical conduct of research with older Australians.

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