In the previous chapters, the concepts and general approaches involved in the analysis of inhabitation and inhabitation practices were laid out. The aim of this chapter is to provide more detail on the analytical and research processes involved and to highlight some of the issues to be confronted in the choice of methods and evaluation criteria to employ. Therefore, the chapter focuses on the fourth proposition outlined in Chapter 1, to adopt a holistic research method to study inhabitation practices. The key question to be addressed is how should inhabitation practices be studied and evaluated by academics, governments or housing agencies? The answer to this question will depend on the precise aims and context of a particular research study and the issue on which it is focused, however, the aim of the chapter is to outline some of the general issues involved and the choices available.

Inhabitation practices include human, animal and material elements, and it was argued in the previous chapter that a blended approach to empirical research was needed that would examine the relationships and interactions between elements in a practice as well as the agency of the individual actants. But this leaves open the key question of how they can be related together and studied given the very different traditions of enquiry involved in existing research on the human, animal and material elements. This is not a new problem or one unique to housing studies, but an issue that has held back research in general. One reason for the difficulties in the adoption of new materialism is the lack of a holistic approach and a language that can integrate the study of these different phenomena and then to use this to devise an appropriate method of analysing and researching them.

The term holistic has been used throughout the book and it is worth spending some time explaining here what is meant by this. Holistic is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘relating to or concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts’.