Prisms on loneliness - a literary qualitative method to capture the intangible: - a creative qualitative method to capture the intangible

Grief.
Loneliness.
Fear.
As social work researchers, we are sometimes faced with phenomena that are difficult to capture with traditional methods, because they are difficult to put into words, see, hear, or capture ethnographically. This may be phenomena that we clearly feel, perhaps even recognize ourselves, but which are difficult to move beyond and away from an experience for me, in me, and to something shared with others.
Most of us have experiences of loneliness and fear, perhaps also grief. But that does not necessarily mean that we have a language for it. Asking about it can be surrounded by a certain stigma, especially when working with people in vulnerable positions. Hence, as researchers we may constantly be questioning whether we are initiating something that we cannot shut down again, and whether we are about to create too intimate of a space? (Author 2020).
During a recently completed three-year ethnographic project on loneliness among vulnerable older people, as well as a new research project on loneliness among children and adolescents in residential care, I have worked on both qualifying and challenging dominant understandings of loneliness in social work (Author 2023a, 2024). Most such studies are based on an individualized approach to loneliness. But new research shows that loneliness is fluid and dynamic, something that grows and decreases in different contexts, spaces, and relationships, like waves rising and falling (Ozawa-De Silva 2021; Author 2023a). What does this mean for how we can understand the sensual, spatial, and bodily dimensions of loneliness? Does this call for other openings and methodological approaches?