Lessons from restudying
Sheppey
Dawn Lyon (University of Kent)
and Graham Crow (University of Southampton)
Community Re-studies
Nottingham, 12 April 2011
The original study
 Divisions of Labour (1984) based on an
extensive, team-based, mixed methods project
 Methods included essays written by 142 school
leavers in May 1978 (mainly 16-year-olds, 90
boys, 52 girls), imagining themselves towards
the end of their lives and looking back
 Essays now archived at UK Data Archive
 Speedy publication of ‘Living without a job: how
school leavers see the future’ New Society 2
November 1978: 259-62; focus on themes of
work, unemployment and family
Context: Location of Sheppey
Map of Sheppey
The original study
 The mass of data in essays is under-used: Pahl
acknowledges that article doesn’t do full justice
to essay material which ‘would be extremely
hard to interpret without some knowledge of the
local context. As this improves, I may wish to
modify my present interpretation’ (1978: 262)
 Analysis of young people developed further in
Claire Wallace’s For Richer, For Poorer (1987),
based on ethnography and questionnaires
 Analytical theme of contrasting myth and reality
(Pahl 1984: ch.7; Wallace 1987: 14) open to
being developed further e.g. regarding migration
The original study
The original study
The original study
“One of the things about the Isle of Sheppey is
that there does appear to be a slight low selfesteem amongst people, it tends to get put down
by a lot of people, Islanders, and there’s lots of
myths floating around. What was good about his
[Pahl’s] report was that it cleared up a lot of
those myths, showed them to be unfounded.
One of the myths was that young people never
want to travel off the island so their employment
prospects are very low because they want to
stay on the Island, they don’t want to travel.”
The original study
“But in his report he found that a tremendous lot
of people commuted off the Island. A lot of young
people went to Canterbury College and to
schools in Rochester and what have you, so that
wasn’t really proved to be true. It’s true that if
you ask young people if they haven’t been off
the Island much, they’ve been schooled on the
Island and their first thought is if they’ve got to
get on a train and change here and change
there, it’s going to be a mission, but that would
be the same for anybody leaving school.” (2009
interview with an original adult study participant)
The original study
 Important implication that responsibility for high levels of
unemployment on Sheppey, including youth
unemployment, in a period of recession are not because
of lack of ambition – that would be blaming the victim
 Re-analysis of 1978 essays aided by Pahl’s marginal
notes on the essays including (on a few) ‘total fantasy’
‘totally unrealistic idea of what he earns and what he
gets – own house, car etc.’. Also aided by interviews
conducted recently with Pahl
 Revisiting archived material allows previously
undiscussed themes contained in the essays to be
explored, such as time and place
The re-study 1
 Partial restudy in scope and time
 People involved:
 Universities: Kent (Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman,
Clive Arundell), Southampton (Graham Crow), Essex (UK Data
Archive)
 Community groups: Blue Town Heritage Centre (Jenny Hurkett,
Alice Young), Swale CVS, Sheppey Matters
 Volunteers: from the Blue Town Heritage Centre and beyond
 Artists: ‘Tea’:
http://web.mac.com/p.n.murray/www.teaweb.org/Home.html
 Funding: South East Coastal Communities Project
(SECC): http://www.coastalcommunities.org.uk/ (20092011
The re-study: oral histories 1
 New interviews undertaken in 2010 by local interviewers
trained by academics
 Focus on memories of work connected to dockyard – an
addition to Pahl’s ‘occupational community’ interviews
(n=8, including 1 woman)
 33 new interviews, including 8 women
 Half of the interviewees worked in the dockyard
(including 2 women)
 8 have memories of the dockyard without directly
working there
 7 of the interviewees worked in Blue Town in shops
(butchers and newsagents), hotel, launderette etc
 Evocative of everyday life
The re-study: oral histories 2
‘…that little shop [newsagents] was on the bike run for the
dockyard workers that came into the dockyard. Hundreds and
hundreds of bicycles each day which came from West Minster
and all the towns beyond and Queenborough to work in the
dockyard. And around about seven o’clock you’d hear the hooter
go and my dad would say ‘right, you go and do the, the, the bike
run’. And I had to go out and stand on the kerbside outside my
dad’s shop and we would have newspapers rolled up with ten
Weights or ten Woodbines in there and you’d hand them out.’
‘So that was the situation, and I did this for years and every day,
the biggest problem was getting your money […] So my father
and I then on Saturdays had to go debt collecting!’ [laughter]
(Harry Coombes, age 67, March 2010)
The re-study: 2009-10 essays
 New essays written in 2009-10 by ‘school
leavers’ and youth group members
 Sample more diverse (re age and stage of life)
than in 1978: not simply comparing like with like
 In addition, modes of communicating have
changed as technologies and practices have
developed - especially relevant for young people
 Patterns of youth transitions have changed since
1978, e.g. greater chances of going to
University, and longer life expectancy – several
are written by people imagining themselves
living into their eighties
2009-10 essays: family
 Continuities in importance of ‘family’, especially children
and grandchildren as focus of attention
 ‘I’m going to have a family a boy and a girl, girl called
Alice and don’t no about the boy, have a proper white
wedding get a big house and support my family’ (male)
 ‘I’m a widow with 4 children and 8 grandchildren and
love our get togethers’ (female)
 ‘When I turned 26 I had the best boyfriend ever and… I
was pregnant. I had my baby and I called her Hope. I got
married when I was 37 and my 11 year old was my
bridesmaid’ (female)
 Continuing relevance of discussions from 1970s/1980s
study about family and marriage and how these are
affected by economic change
2009-10 essays: work
 Continuing importance of family as a route into work:
 ‘Finally getting through collage with all my grades
including a A in product design, all I now had to do was
get a job at my grandad’s work’ (male);
 ‘After being at college I started work on the farm where
my dad got me a job’ (male)
 And strong ambition to own one’s own business:
 ‘At 32 I opened my own café in Sheerness High Street’
(female);
 ‘by the age of 24 I had fulfilled my dream of becoming
my own boss’ (male);
 ‘I don’t want to just work for someone in a hairdressers, I
want to be able to have my own salon’ (63, female)
Comparison: education
 Shift from boys’ aspirations of apprenticeship
(34% in 1978) to university study (27% in 2010)
 In 1978, 70% of girls did not imagine continuing
post-16 education; in 2010, 19% did not
 In 2010, similar proportions of girls imagine FE
college (39%) and university (37%)
 Subjects of study less gendered in 2010 than in
1978, e.g.
Comparison: geographical mobility
 Approximately half of essay writers in each cohort
mentioned geographical mobility
 Shift of location from dream of living elsewhere in UK to
moving abroad
 Move elsewhere in UK: 1978 - 15% of boys; 25% of girls
 Move abroad:
 1978 - 11% of boys; 6% of girls
 2010 - 27% of boys; 23% of girls
 Proportion of boys expecting to stay on Sheppey
dropped (from 8% to 4%) but remained stable amongst
the girls (6%)
 Less than 10% across both cohorts anticipated moving
away then returning
Access to materials
 Artists, Tea, produced DVD on Blue Town High
Street - brought together memories of older
people (voices) with old photographs of
buildings, imagined future of buildings drawn by
young people, and present-day footage along
the street
 Project developed website (not yet live) to be
dynamic archive of oral histories, essays, visual
and other materials on living and working on
Sheppey
Concluding thoughts 1
 Material from essays links in to wider on-going
debates about young people’s ambitions,
aspirations, plans, strategies, expectations,
dreams, fantasies, and the best ways of
capturing these
 Different interpretations of material by different
members of the research team, e.g. regarding
‘hope’ and ‘constraint’
 Oral histories relevant for thinking about
occupational communities, loss, nostalgia,
deindustrialisation
 Project enabled community group to pursue
ongoing collection of memories
Concluding thoughts 2
 Continuity of context – place and socioeconomic climate
 Ongoing work: It would be fascinating to get
accounts of what actually happened in the lives
of the 1978 essay writers now aged 49
 In particular, what would they say about views
expressed on ageing: ‘at 40, I can safely say my
life had ended’ (male); ‘by 50 I was old’
(female)?
References
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Anderson, M. et al (2005) ‘Timespans and plans among young adults’
Sociology 39(1) 139-55
Brannen, J. and Nilsen, A. (2002) ‘Young people’s time perspectives:
From youth to adulthood’ Sociology 36(3) 513-37.
Brannen, J. and Nilsen, A. (2007) ‘Young people, time horizons and
planning, A response to Anderson et al’ Sociology 41(1) 153-60.
Himmelweit, H. et al (1952) ‘The views of adolescents on some aspects
of the social class structure’, British Journal of Sociology 3(2) 148-72
Pahl, R.E. (1978) ‘Living without a job: how school leavers see the future’
New Society 2 November 1978: 259-62
Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
Thompson, R. and Holland, J. (2002) ‘Imagined adulthood: resources,
plans and contradictions’ Gender and Education 14(4) 337-50.
Veness, T. (1962) School Leavers: Their Aspirations and Expectations
(London: Methuen)
Wallace, C. (1987) For Richer, For Poorer: Growing up in and out of work
(London: Tavistock)