Visualising Family Estrangement

Academic

Intern

Jack Melton

Project Summary

For this project, Dr Ashley Barnwell provided me with a survey she ran earlier this year which asked participants a series of questions on the circumstances and emotional ramifications of their experiences with family estrangement. Questions included basic demographic information (age, gender, profession, etc.), estrangement-related statistics (length of estrangement, who initiated the estrangement, which family members the respondent was estranged from, etc), and free-text responses to questions about the estrangement, with example questions including ‘Have you found it difficult to tell people or to talk about the estrangement?’ and ‘Have your feelings about the estrangement changed over time, and if so, how?’ In my brief and in early conversations about the data, Ash made it clear that what she wanted was a project which used data visualisation to create new ways of engaging in or thinking about early data exploration. From these conversations I decided to take a smorgasbord approach to creating data visualisations, rather than embracing a single visual technique I wanted to present Ash with a series of different ways she could reengage with her data that could be informative or inspiring.