METHODS OF RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
THE PRIMARY SOURCES of original research that I use in this book are ethnographic observations and long-form, semistructured interviews with more than three hundred people who live alone. In addition, I draw on interviews with people who assist, interact with, or design for those who live alone, including social workers, family caregivers, community organizers, political officials, urban planners, architects, and scientists working on artificial intelligence.
All of the ethnographic observations and interviews took place in major metropolitan areas, and it should be clear that this book is primarily about living alone in cities. Those who are interested in learning more about the experience of living alone in rural areas or small towns will need to look elsewhere, for although I too am curious about these issues my work does not allow me to contribute much to our knowledge about them. The majority of the research presented here took place in four boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens), whose diversity allowed for a heterogeneous sample within the parameters of a great city. The fieldwork also extended to other metropolitan regions, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, and Stockholm. And the research included extensive reviews of the secondary literature on living alone in many other parts of the world, such as England, France, Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Brazil.
I used different methods to recruit subjects from each of the following four groups of people who live alone: young adult professionals (between the ages of twenty-eight and forty); middle-age middle-class adults (ages forty to sixty-five); poor men in SROs (ages thirty to sixty-five); and the old (age sixty-five and above). For the young adults we used a targeted snowball sample, seeking out people from a broad range of backgrounds, neighborhoods, and professional fields (i.e., not simply interviewing a convenience sample of any singletons willing to speak with us, but rather asking subjects to identify other people who lived alone and were different from themselves). We also made special efforts to recruit African American women because of their relatively high rates of living alone. For the middle-age, middle-class adults we used three techniques: poster advertisements, snowballing, and Web-based solicitations. Again, for this group we made special efforts to recruit a diverse sample, by occupation, ethnicity, sex, and location. For the poor men in SROs we worked through referrals from social workers at a supportive housing organization in New York City. For the older subjects, we used referrals from the staff at senior centers and from social workers, as well as direct invitations at senior centers that allowed us to visit and explain our project. None of the subjects were paid to participate. And all but those who are already public figures were guaranteed anonymity, which is a common way to protect human subjects in social science research.
I designed the interview questionnaires for each group of subjects and conducted many of the interviews personally. I also hired and trained a team of graduate students to help with the interviews and the recruitment of subjects. We consulted regularly, especially at the early stages of the project, as we fine-tuned the interview questions to address unexpected topics. The graduate student researchers wrote extensive field notes on their observations and identified their most common observations as well as their most surprising discoveries. These notes, and those that I recorded personally, were crucial to the analytic and interpretive process.
As a sociologist, my aim is not to report the most sensational stories that I learned from studying the world of singletons, but to uncover the shared experiences and orientations that tell us something about the fundamental features of solo life. To distinguish between common and uncommon experiences, idiosyncratic and widely held views, I entered transcripts for 273 of my interviews into ATLAS.ti, a computer program that facilitates the coding and analysis of large qualitative data sets. I selected the individuals and the stories that appear in this book based on how well they expressed the most interesting and important findings from this analysis. The cost of this approach is that some intriguing personalities, extreme perspectives, and entertaining anecdotes are excluded from your consideration. The benefit is that the themes highlighted herein are general social phenomena, ones we need to understand as we come to grips with a world in which so many of us live alone.