Our Approach

“This project emerged in a time of crisis. We wanted to create a space for people to share the wholeness of their experience in the creative ways that they chose.”

—the Fed Family Research Team

Examples of participant submissions by Julianne*, Emily, Liliana* and Dominique.
(click images to enlarge)

Our Approach

This project focuses on people who perform caregiving duties, people who do the work of feeding their families, and people who have experience with the challenges of feeding infants. Using interviews, surveys, and digital ethnography, we asked about the everyday experiences of caregivers as they navigated feeding their families in the wake of a crisis-level formula shortage in the United States and supply chain disruption in Canada due to its reliance on imports from the U.S. We wanted to understand how families navigate child feeding and the rising cost of infant formula during a time when many people’s incomes do not cover the basic costs of living. We wanted to expose infant food insecurities in two wealthy nations through caregiver stories and then put those stories in front of organizational and institutional decision-makers with the power to make change.

Our project began with stories of women, primarily mothers, who created Facebook groups to help themselves and others find formula during the shortage. As one said, “I turned to social media out of pure desperation, asking other moms if they […] had any extras in their cupboard.” There were hundreds of groups across the U.S. and Canada, so we selected 15 group administrators from several regions and asked about local supply issues, how people were coping, and the mutual aid work they were doing. We wanted to hear from more caregivers, so we conducted a survey with the help of Facebook group administrators. Thirty-nine caregivers who took part in the interviews and/or survey then joined us in a digital ethnography.

The material on this website is largely taken from this ethnographic work. Over the course of 6 weeks, we sent weekly prompts to our participants using the digital qualitative research platform Indeemo. Each prompt asked participants about some element of their everyday life related to household work and caregiving, inviting them to use various kinds of creative expression, including posters, collage, photography, poetry, song, diaries, drawing, letter-writing, and movement to capture their everyday life.

A question for many sociologists is how to gain access to the everyday lives of people who are spread across time and space. Using Indeemo, we were able to devise a digital ethnographic method that allowed us to reach people at the very heart of where caregiving work takes place: in the home. The rich data reveals how regular people live and manage family life, and importantly, how they reflect on and represent their experiences. We invited submissions on the following themes:

Week 1: Getting to know you
Caregivers introduced themselves by video and told a story about how parenting had changed them. We asked participants to create an image that represented this change.

Week 2: Exploring your feeding work
Caregivers created short videos that highlighted three daily tasks they do to feed their children.

Week 3: Formula shortages
Caregivers shared what they had to do to find infant formula and how they felt about food insecurities related to formula shortages using lists, diary entries, poems, songs, collages, and body movement.

Week 4: “Making do” without enough money
Caregivers explored income-based food insecurity and how lack of money affected their ability to feed themselves, and their infants and young children. They shared images that represented what ‘payday’ meant to them in relation to their feeding work and drew puzzles of their income sources and/or resources they used to feed their families.

Image of participants’ view of the Indeemo platform.

Week 5: Who needs to hear your story?
The final task invited caregivers to think about moments that revealed how outside influences (people, policy, organizations, or institutions) affected their feeding in both negative and positive ways. Caregivers wrote letters, made videos, protest signs, and cartoon strips to tell someone with power or authority stories about the work of feeding children in difficult circumstances.

Collaboration was key to our approach. The research team was made up sociologists, researchers, a documentary filmmaker, and students in sociology, English, law and society, theater, politics, women and gender studies, and psychology. Students wrote vignettes, song lyrics, and were trained in qualitative analysis, video editing, data collection, and coding. We also worked with a choir. See the Project Team page for more details.

Image of participant submissions as they appeared to the researchers on the Indeemo platform.

Image of research team as it appeared to participants on the Indeemo platform.

The final phase of the project will involve using the material on this website in interviews with institutional decision-makers.