“How can interactive installations provide Chinese women with a reflective space to reconsider marital choices shaped by family and social expectations?”
When I first started Unit 3, my research question was:
“How can process of images/arts analysis shape Chinese women’s decision-making and social and familial expectations in marital choices?”
At that stage, my thinking was largely influenced by sociological and feminist readings. I wanted to uncover how marriage decisions for Chinese women are framed by structures of family and society, and I believed that image-based analysis could be a method to make those pressures visible. However, the wording of this question was quite broad and leaned more towards sociology. The role of visual analysis and artistic practice remained underdeveloped, which also appeared in the feedback I received.
Through feedback from tutors and peers, I realised that my project needed a sharper alignment between research question and methodology. Instead of asking how “images” in general might influence decision-making, I was actually working through interactive, participatory interventions. My staged experiments—from historical images to everyday scenes, and finally to installation—revealed that installation art was becoming my main research tool.
This led me to reframe my question, moving from a sociological framing toward an arts-based one. After several iterations, discussions, and reflections on what my interventions really do, the refined question became:
“How can interactive installations provide Chinese women with a reflective space to reconsider marital choices shaped by family and social expectations?”
This version is more specific in three ways:
Method clarity: It directly points to interactive installations as my artistic method.
Focus: It retains Chinese women’s marital choices as the research context.
Outcome: It emphasises reflection rather than direct “decision-making,” which is more realistic for the scope of my project.
While my current participants are international (since I am conducting the work in the UK), I have decided not to dilute the research focus by rewriting the question around “global marriage choices.” Instead, I will treat the international engagement as a cross-cultural lens—their responses may highlight both the specificity and the universality of Chinese women’s experiences. This will enrich the findings, but the research question itself remains grounded in the Chinese context.
Looking back, the process of iterating my research question mirrors the shift in my practice: from broad sociological ambition, to a more precise articulation of how art—especially installation—can intervene in social reflection. This alignment between what I ask and what I do feels like an important step in refining both my research and my practice.
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