Archived news
19 August 2009: Pioneer Projects grant for Paul Thompson & Ken Plummer
In the Field and After: Life Stories of Pioneer Qualitative Researchers
From its start in 1994 (with Paul Thompson then as first Director) Qualidata – now part of the UK Data Archive at Essex – set about rescuing and archiving as many of the research data of classic examples of social research carried out in the last fifty years as could be located. In many cases the material has been archived at Essex (for example the entire lifetime’s research of Peter Townsend on ageing, poverty and the family), but other social research has gone to the most relevant specialist archives elsewhere.
British social research experienced an unprecedented flowering from the 1940s to the 1970s, and this enabled many researchers to carry out their research on a scale and with a methodological diversity which could not easily be repeated today. Thus Townsend, for his in-depth national study of old people’s homes, The Last Refuge, not only used elaborate quantification, but personally visited over a hundred institutions throughout Britain, even taking a temporary job as a bath attendant in one home, recording and theorising from his experience. The high quality of such research makes it in our view exceptionally worthwhile to revisit.
From the beginning, an in-depth life story interview with the most significant researchers was recorded, usually by Paul Thompson. Each interview covers family and social background and key influences with detailed accounts of major projects. Because of their detail, these interviews are long – in Peter Townsend’s case extending to twenty hours of recording. Those recorded also include Michael Young, Janet Finch and Colin Bell on family, kinship and community; W.M. Williams on rural and Meg Stacey on urban community studies; Dennis Marsden on single mothers and education; Stan Cohen on deviance and prisons; George Brown and Tirril Harris on the social origins of depression; Ray Pahl on urban sociology; Paul Thompson on oral history; and Sir Raymond Firth on anthropology in the Pacific and in Britain and Sir Jack Goody and Mary Douglas on Africa and anthropological theory. These interviews are already available, with information about the research studies, as a resource through ESDS Qualidata, and copies are currently being made at the British Library Sound Archive. All are fully transcribed as well as summarised in detail.
Qualidata is no longer allowed to fund new research, but in the process of creating a website from these interviews, combining audio interview extracts, interview texts and research data. We have immediate plans for further articles, a CD of extracts, and eventually for a book. We see this combination of original research data with in-depth interviews which give the researcher’s `owning up’ accounts as a unique resource both for research publications and also as a potential major asset for future social science methodological teaching. A parallel autobiographical approach has also been the basis of notable books such as Bell and Newby’s Doing Sociological Research (1977), Roberts’ Doing Feminist Research (1981) and more recently Alan Macfarlane’s valuable interviews – much briefer, in video/DVD – with anthropologists.
In our view the Essex Pioneers collection is already of unique value. We have published from it two special issues of the International Journal of Social Science Methodology: 7, 1 (2004) and 11, 2 (2008). However, we are very keen to complete the collection with a further round of twelve interviews, which would allow us to give it more balance in three ways: by including more accounts from women researchers; by adding more anthropologists; and by including some contributions on the linked social research in cultural studies and social geography. Ann Oakley, John Davis, John Rex, Pat Caplan, Michael Schofield and Peter Hall have all agreed to be interviewed for this purpose. These new interviews would in most cases be carried out by the applicants, but some interviews would be recorded by Liz Spencer and other particularly experienced qualitative interviewers. This application is solely to enable this new fieldwork.
The immediate outcome of the project will be the archiving and availability for all social researchers of a further set of key autobiographical interviews with leading social researchers of the last fifty years. The second and third major outcomes will be the selection of material made available on the website and the CD. This will be publicised through the website itself , the CD and the workshop at the end of the project, to which leading contemporary researchers will be invited. We see the completion of interviewing for the Pioneers as a crucial step towards the creation of a new resource for social science methods, fully updatable, for both researchers and teachers, and indeed the wider public, presenting the cumulative experience of the past in a readily available form for the future.