Lived experience is a category of knowledge that is widely invoked across a range of social scientific research fields and the public sphere. Rather than seeking to create yet another definition, Paul Jones explores how the term is used in practice by sociologists and what this reveals about lived experience more broadly.

Some years ago, I started to notice the term lived experience appearing frequently in academic sociology. My sense was that lived experience referred to direct, practical connection with some or other element of social life, but its use in context often suggested that it was something more than this. And tantalisingly, on occasion lived experience operated as a kind of a trump card to explain questions related to theories and methods; its very use would have people nodding in agreement.

Further muddying the waters, in amongst this popularity, critiques of how lived experience was overlooked, undervalued, or otherwise marginalised in academic research circulated. Some of the places where sociologies of lived experience were being developed and celebrated, were also the ones where sociologies that overlooked it were being critiqued. I used to use the social media platform Twitter (remember that?) and my timeline was full of calls for more knowledge from/with lived experience, appeals made alongside criticisms of knowledge that overlooked such valuable insights. All of this was happening in a context where the incidence of the term lived experience was proliferating in academic and general literature in the English-speaking world.

I came to think of lived experience as deployed as a cryptic idea that posed a series of knotty problems for sociology, but that contained lots of implicit assumptions. On the one hand, who has a greater insight into social phenomena than those who have experienced them first-hand? But on the other, what is the role for sociologists relative to the realities we study; as Weber asked, need one have been Caeser to understand Caeser? And what did lived experience mean anyway?

On the one hand, who has a greater insight into social phenomena than those who have experienced them first-hand? But on the other, what is the role for sociologists relative to the realities we study?

Against this backdrop I carried out a modest research project to explore how sociologists use lived experience in their work. I was not interested in developing my own definition of lived experience, nor to pass judgement on those academics who used it, or to criticise participatory methods, or to demean the significance of the actual experiences and voices of participants (far from it). Quite simply, I wanted to better understand what academic sociologists meant when they wrote about lived experience.  

The Study

I analysed articles published June 2017–June 2023 in one of the four British Sociological Association journals – Sociology; Work, Employment and Society; Cultural Sociology; and Sociological Research Online – that mentioned lived experience. 36 publications did, and I read them all closely, and came to the following four conclusions about these articles:

1. The use of ‘lived experience’ was not accompanied by a definition

None of the 36 papers I read contained a definition of lived experience per se. Stated bluntly like this, it perhaps seems that I’m i) being critical of my colleagues who authored the articles and/or ii) calling for more detailed definitions of “lived experience”. Neither is the case, but I do think that the absence of definition opens some interesting lines of inquiry. Reading the articles, I came to appreciate both the important short hand affordance that ‘lived experience’ has in foregrounding knowledge emerging from direct experience, and the difficulty – maybe even impossibility? – of developing a precise formulation to capture the messy and entangled nature that characterised participants’ social lives.

we can tend towards taking for granted the language and ideas that we imagine others to already understand

In short, the complicated social positions that were being discussed required the use of some proxy formulations. ‘Lived experience’ acknowledges this infinitely detailed entanglement between practices and structures while ‘bracketing off’ the need to unpack all the associated nuance. However, and as an observation, we can tend towards taking for granted the language and ideas that we imagine others to already understand; in terms of academic research, assumptions can be smuggled into our analysis in the process. This is as true of critical and participatory descriptions in research and analyses, such as are underpinned by ‘lived experience’, as it is for ideologically narrowing terms that we find being normalised, valorised and shared in more exclusionary spaces. Canons of knowledge characterise both inclusionary and exclusionary discourses.

2. The articles assessed were all qualitative in nature

Sociology is home to lots of methods that could be used to study the experiences of others. In the articles reviewed there was universal adoption of qualitative methods and a strong tendency towards interviews, with 31 of the 36 papers sampled using them in some form or other. The notion that lived experience can be accessed by talking methods is perhaps unsurprising: as one of the aims of lived experience research is participatory, given that giving voice to participants’ typically overlooked or undervalued positions is a corollary of this starting point. The reliance on qualitative research in the form of interviews could also be a feature of the journals I chose to analyse, which are all overwhelmingly qualitative in nature. But, from the sample, there is a close affinity between interviews and sociological accounts of lived experience.

3. Having lived experience conferred authority on participants’ claims

The role of evidence, and the relationship between academic and other forms of knowledge, are not straightforward issues for sociology. Interviews not only dominated the sample, but interviewees’ words were afforded an authority and a credence therein. However, the creation of context around lived experience was a key part of the original sociological work being done, with authors situating the words and accounts of the participants within structural conditions of action (and academic literatures addressing such).  In this sense the use of the term lived experience,  as distinct from the actual lives that people live, gave the research proximity to the worlds under consideration. Reflective of this, the Conclusions of almost all the articles (31of the 36 articles at hand) contained direct words of participants by way of summarising the paper’s argument.  

4. Does ‘lived experience sociology’ constitute a coherent subfield?

On the one hand the topically disparate nature of the articles under review seems to make for a highly differentiated field, with studies of Covid wards, benefit sanctions, survivors of gendered violence, or the exploitation of migrant workers is empirically so variant to undermine any claims to coherence. On the other, underlying commonalities of approaches were stable: the marginalised position of those participating the research, the qualitative and participatory methods, and the implied normative consensus between participants with lived experience and authors (participants with lived experience of the same topic do not necessarily agree on the social causes and realities) individuals were not understood as straightforward representatives of groups. Moving towards an answer to my original questions of definition, by implication all the articles sampled used ‘lived experience’ as an antonym for social structure and as a synonym for private life, feelings, and perceptions.  

So, what is lived experience?

Using lived experience in social science does something to analysis, grouping some elements together, foregrounding some things and backgrounding others. The research project I carried addressing sociological articles suggests that despite evading a singular definitive definition, lived experience is deployed with both descriptive and analytic intent. As way of describing participatory methods and the politics associated with amplifying voice from marginalised positions, ‘lived experience’ highlights knowledges from outside of academic social science, and a common feature in some research spaces, while being ostensibly absent in others. Although it lacks precision at the point of use, my research suggests an important function for lived experience as a category; we must beware of dilution of the term that can accompany its normalisation though, and sharpened collective understanding of its promise will ensure its continued cogency in illuminating social life.

This post draws on the author’s article, Engaging With Lived Experience: Towards a Sociological Biography of a Sociological Category, published in Sociological Research Online.

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Image Credit: Detail from Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth, The Cleveland Museum of Art (Public Domain).