Making the most of existing data

Peter Jackson

Cooking numbers and eating words…ESRC Festival of Social SciencesLeeds Town Hall, March 2007

Families remembering food• Project funded via the Leverhulme Trust

programme on Changing Families, Changing Food • An inter-disciplinary programme involving health

researchers, social scientists, historians etc• Collaborative project with Graham Smith (School

for Health and Related Research) and Sarah Olive (ICoSS)

• An oral history project, re-using existing archival collections.

Changing Families, Changing Food

Families remembering food

• Re-analysing life history data from three existing collections• The Edwardians

• 100 Families

• Millennium Memory Bank.

The Edwardians

• 444 interviews collected by Paul Thompson and research team at Essex

• Schedule-driven interviews covering parents, childhood, schooling, employment, politics, religion, class, marriage (and food)

• Collected in the 1970s • Up to 6 hours long• Tapes and transcripts

100 Families• >200 interviews, also collected by Paul Thompson

at Essex• Interviews with members of 2-3 generations of

the same family• Similar schedule to the Edwardians (focusing on

Families, Social Mobility and Ageing)• Collected in 1986-7• Approx. 5 hours long• Tapes and transcripts

Millennium Memory Bank

• c.2000 interviews collected by wide range of interviewers for broadcast on local radio stations

• Coordinated by National Sound Archive (British Library) but highly variable in content, length, quality etc.

• No schedule but covers a wide range of topics• Collected in 2000• Digitally recorded, summaries (no transcripts).

Value of re-use

• To challenge present-day myths

• Changing gender roles and domestic routines

• Inter-generational transmission of family values (constructions of motherhood, fathers and sons etc)

The myth of the family meal (The Edwardians)

• the decline of ‘the family meal’

• never universal (geographically, by social class etc)

• in Edwardian England, families rarely had a regular ‘family meal’ (working or middle class)

• meal times regulated by the demands of factory work

• mid-day rather than evenings

• a (middle class) ideal rather than a routine practice.

Men’s role in domestic life (100 Families)• women take primary responsibility for

domestic chores (cooking, cleaning etc)• where men cook it is usually in

exceptional circumstances (death or hospitalisation of spouse, at weekends and special occasions, as a hobby…)

• ‘cooking to cope’.

Challenges and issues of re-use• Practical issues:

• Re-using existing datasets can be an efficient use of limited research time (avoids time-consuming recruitment of respondents, training of interviewers, data collection, transcription etc)

• Working to someone else’s agenda (can’t ask follow-up questions)

• Schedule-driven interviews facilitate comparison between respondents but schedule may not cover your specific interests (free-form narrative often more revealing but limits comparison)

• Temptation of extracting ‘data’ on a specific issue (e.g. smoking in 100 Families, Rosemary Eliot, Oral History, 2001) when the strength of life history is to locate specific issues in wider biographical and social context.

Challenges and issues

• Epistemological issues• Life histories involve a dialogic between past and

present (the past seen through the lens of the present)• Memory is often incomplete, distorted, unreliable – but

life history focuses on the role of memory, nostalgia, selective remembering and forgetting (‘the myths we live by’)

• Spontaneous contributions vs prompted reflections• Participants were invited to reflect on their Edwardian

upbringing from the perspective of the 1970s (but not to discuss changes during the intervening period)

• Interviews were recorded under specific historical conditions and reflect the concerns of that period.

Challenges and issues• Ethical issues

• Often easier to interpret other people’s data than material you have collected yourself (emotional and analytical distance)

• Ethical responsibility towards respondents and interviewers (e.g. where transcripts include interviewers’ notes)

• Although respondents have ‘signed off’ their interviews (giving written consent to re-use), ethical issues arise in re-using data for different purposes than interviewees anticipated.

Conclusion

• Many benefits of re-using existing datasets

• An under-used resource• Need to understand the nature of the

dataset, when and how interviews were recorded etc.

• Need to be aware of practical, epistemological and ethical issues.