This document discusses a qualitative longitudinal study that used various visual and narrative methods to explore how people think about and plan for the future in relation to energy use. It describes using timelines, photos, and video clips to prompt discussions about participants' visions of the future and how their views may change over time. Challenges included asking direct questions about the future, which some found difficult, and balancing in-depth multimodal activities with time constraints and ethical considerations in qualitative longitudinal research.

1. Asking about the
future: Insights from
Energy Biographies
Fiona Shirani
Karen Henwood, Catherine Butler, Karen Parkhill, Chris
Groves and Nick Pidgeon.
Presentation at SLLS conference 9-11 October 2014

2. Time and the future in QLL
• QLL concerned with temporality
• Division of time into past/present/future has significance for
understanding personal biographies
• How people imagine the future can have an impact on present
experiences and circumstances
• QLL has a unique position to see how perceptions of the
future change over time

3. Energy Biographies
• QLL project exploring how people use energy as part of their
everyday lives
• How do people’s biographical experiences and aspirations
impact on energy use?
• How can visual methods be used to explore views and
experiences of energy use?
• 4 case site areas across the UK – 74 participants/68 initial
interviews, 36 took part in the QLL interviews and activities

4. Why not just ask?
• Structured questionnaire and survey questions (e.g. Anderson et al.,
2005)
• Timelines/writing tasks (Henwood and Shirani, 2012; Hanna and
Lau-Clayton, 2012)
• Asking a direct question (Phoenix et al., 2007)
• Challenges with these approaches
“Yeah isn’t this hard? Do you know it’s really hard, that’s a
really hard question!”
“At the moment this will sound like a really badly thought out
plan but I tend not to think that far ahead because the future
does actually scare me.”
“Oh God, I literally, you just don't know what's around the
corner”

5. Text-prompted photos
• 10 text messages over a 3 month period ‘take a picture of
what you are doing’
• Point of comparison across the dataset
• Not necessarily related to energy use
• Aspects of daily life that may not otherwise be discussed
• Timeline could be used as a prompt for past/future lifestyle

6. “I’m very keen to get an electric car and maybe in five years’ time that might
already be a possibility but I would sort of say maybe in 10 to 15 years’ time that
it’s a lot more a possibility than now. Maybe my needs would have changed a
little bit by then, my son would probably be driving so maybe we only need it as
a family maybe only have you know a petrol car and maybe then a little electric
car for me and my wife to sort of go around for local trips or something like that.
So yeah I think there may be some changes as the kind of household grows into
different needs … Maybe by then the kind of car hire you can sort of do by you
know Sit Car or Street Car or something where you hire them by the hour if and
when you need them so you have Car Club membership maybe that is more
widespread in 10/15 years’ time so there may be some changes the way we
sort of think. So I’m hoping to have our house the energy consumption of the
house reduced by a lot.” (Dennis)
How will the society be like? [Laughs] That’s a broad
question. It’s really difficult to answer that.

7. Videos
• During interview 3 participants were shown clips from 1950s
and 2010s videos of what the home of the future might be like
• What did/didn’t you like?
• Was anything surprising?
• How would you expect/like things to be different?

8. I thought I’d go for that big time, I think it’s a brilliant idea you
know this challenge of having to feed 9 billion people, the more
food production you could get into city flats the better. Yeah I
thought that was wonderful … if you take that, go down that
route nature then becomes a spiritual and a leisure resource
because food growing, food production is decoupled from wild
nature so wilderness becomes preserved and maintained for its
own intrinsic value not for its economic, well it could have an
economic value because people would pay to visit it but it
wouldn’t be utilitarian in the sense the farmland is. So I say bring
that on! It’s bloody brilliant and you know you could upscale it
and feed whole tower blocks, not with everything but with a
good proportion of their need for green stuff (Jonathan)

9. But there’s a price to pay for it and it’s not just the money,
you know you walk around the city and it looks pretty dire
sometimes and everyone is in their little houses and you
know in lots of futuristic films you see cities of the future and
they look, they’re wrecked, everything looks dreadful, there’s
advertising hoardings everywhere and you know people are
flying around on hover boards and stuff but the actual cities
are dirty and it’s kind of realising that as people create their
environments in their minds and in their interiors they’re
less bothered about what’s going on out there. (Jack)

10. Things to consider
• Resources for wider social futures may be scarce
• Multimodal activities are time-consuming
• Within or outside the interview encounter?
• Ethical issues in discussing the future
• Technical challenges

11. Summary -Multimodality in QLL
• Activities can help to sustain engagement and aid sample
maintenance
• More time – greater opportunity to include a range of
techniques
• Contribute to temporal understanding in QLL
• Can capture the ways views about the future change over time