Not continuity or change
but continuity and change
Graham Crow (University of Southampton)
G.P.Crow@soton.ac.uk
Interdisciplinary perspectives on continuity and change:
what counts as QLR?
NCRM Network of Methodological Innovation event
University of Southampton, 15 November 2012
Overview of presentation
• Outline of project on Isle of Sheppey, Kent, involving a partial
re-study of a modern sociological classic focussing on ordinary
people’s everyday lives
• Discussion of ‘imagined futures’ essays written by young
people for what they tell us about worldviews
• Comparing ‘then’ and ‘now’ and looking for continuities as well
as changes
Overview of Sheppey project
 South East Coastal Communities Project 2009-10, funded by
HEFCE
 Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman (University of
Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny
Hurkett, Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre, Sheerness),
in association with TEA, and UK Data Archive
 Focus on memories of the Naval Dockyard (closed 1960) and
its occupational community and on young people’s imagined
futures
 Partial re-study of Ray Pahl’s 1970s/80s study
Location of Sheppey
Map of Sheppey
The original study
 Divisions of Labour (1984) based on an extensive, mixed
methods project
 Methods included essays written by 142 school leavers in May
1978 (mainly 16-year-olds, 89 boys, 52 girls), imagining
themselves towards the end of their lives and looking back
 Essays now archived at UKDA
 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
 Analytical theme developed of contrasting myth and reality
(Pahl 1984: ch.7; Wallace 1987: 14)
Aspirations of geographical
mobility in the 1978 essays
• Not all essays locate their authors’ imagined futures, but 55 of
the 141 envisage geographical mobility beyond Kent:
• London (12 essays)
• Scotland (3 essays), Cornwall (3 essays)
• Crawley, Derby, Devon, Doncaster, Dorset, Hampshire,
Newcastle, Newmarket, Northampton, Norwich, Portsmouth,
Reading, Wales (1 essay each)
• USA (4 essays), Australia (3 essays), Germany (2 essays)
• Cyprus, France, Italy, Tibet (1 essay each)
• Overseas ‘seeing the world’ with Armed Forces (11 essays)
• This is at odds with the common-sense victim-blaming focus on
lack of ambition as the explanation of high unemployment
levels
What is the status of such data?
 Archive material includes Ray Pahl’s notes about the essays,
including (on a few)
 ‘total fantasy’ (on 8)
 ‘totally unrealistic idea of what he earns and what he gets –
own house, car etc.’ (on 38)
 In 2009-10 a further 110 essays were collected. They have
many more points of reference to celebrity culture than the
1978 essays do, thus continuing to raise questions about how
‘realistic’ young people’s accounts of their imagined futures are.
Essay 42
This is it. The end of my career is near. Tomorrow I must say goodbye to the footballing
world. Twenty years of playing for the team I have supported since being a child and
then become the manager for twenty five years. Gillingham Football Club, the club I
watched battle through the lower leagues as a child and being scouted by the club at the
age of fifteen, making a record 325 appearances and scoring 72 goals. Playing for the
club I enjoyed two promotions and suffered relegation. I then moved on to be offered the
manager’s job hours after announcing my retirement. It was a total no brainer. This is
what I had dreamt of since being young, watching matches pretending I was the
manager as a child, folding my arms pretending to tell the players what to do. This was
my chance to really live that childhood dream and put my name down in history as the
most successful Gillingham manager. Then I took the club to become the Premier
league champions for five consecutive seasons. The highlight of my career was taking a
nearly relegated, administration bound, Gillingham up three divisions into the Premier
League. This was a project that took my whole career and most of my life. All this was
fantastic and exactly how I wanted to live my life. Now I have fulfilled my life ambition I
can die happily knowing my life has had an affect on others and I have supported and
nurtured other young players that, like me, have aspired to be one of the greats.
npower League Two Table 13/11/2012
Position
Team
Played
Points
1 Gillingham 17
37
2 Port Vale
17
32
3 Cheltenham 17
32
4 Bradford
17
28
5 Fleetwood 17
28
6 Rochdale
17
27
7 Burton Albion 17
26
8 Torquay
17
25
9 Rotherham 16
25
10 Exeter
17
24
11 Southend
17
23
12 Northampton 17
23
13 York
17
23
14 Dag and Red 17
22
15 Morecambe 17
22
16 Accrington 16
21
17 Oxford Utd 17
20
18 Chesterfield 17
19
19 Plymouth
17
18
20 Bristol Rovers16
17
21 Wimbledon 17
17
22 Wycombe
16
13
23 Barnet
17
13
24 Aldershot
17
13
Making sense of these data – the craft
of qualitative longitudinal research
 Relevance of debates generated by use of this and other
techniques about ambitions, aspirations, plans, strategies,
expectations, dreams, fantasies and the best ways of capturing
these (Himmelweit et al 1952; Veness 1962; Elliott 2005;
Anderson et al 2005; Brannen & Nilsen 2002, 2007)
 Different interpretations by different members of the research
team regarding ‘hope’/‘constraint’
 Sheppey as a ‘space of hope’ (Harvey, 2000)
 Imagination as a space in which hope can be explored
Making sense of these data – the craft
of qualitative longitudinal research
 It is tempting to highlight change because this is often what
jumps out from the data.
 This is true, for example, of the greater prominence of celebrity
culture in the 2009-10 essays compared to the 1978 ones
 It is also true of visual materials
Making sense of these data – the craft
of qualitative longitudinal research
 But there are also important continuities in underlying patterns,
once we acknowledge the presence of changing cultural
expressions (e.g. perspectives on ageing and being ‘old’)
 These are still quite strongly gendered imaginations, in some
respects (e.g. girls’ essays are more likely than boys’ essays to
mention having children) and there are persistent differences in
the types of work envisaged (e.g. girls and care work)
 There is also the continuing importance of place – local
connections offer something of a ‘safe space’
 Important to remember that Pahl’s original research is ‘an
interesting study of an unusual place’ – but where is ‘typical’?
Making sense of these data – the craft
of qualitative longitudinal research
• Final point that theme of continuity and change also relates to
theory and methods
• It is not only because of social change, but also because of
methodological and theoretical developments, that we cannot
‘step into the same river twice’
• We found it quite useful to undertake some quantitative
analysis of the frequency with which themes appeared in the
essays, influenced in part by Pahl’s concerns about ‘cherry
picking’ from qualitative data and focusing on the striking cases
rather than the routine ones. This fits with theoretical interests
in ‘ordinariness’
References
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.
Crow, G. (2008) ‘Thinking about families and communities over time’, in R. Edwards (ed.)
Researching Families and Communities. London: Routledge, 11-24.
Crow, G. (2012) ‘Community studies: lessons and prospects’, Sociological Review 60(3) 405-20.
Crow, G. and Lyon, D. (2011) ‘Turning points in work and family lives in the imagined futures of
young people on Sheppey in 1978’ in M. Winterton, G. Crow and Brett-Morgan (eds) Young Lives
and Imagined Futures: Insights from Archived Data
http://www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk/resources/publications
Elliott, J. (2005) Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches
(London: Sage)
Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press.
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
Lyon, D., Morgan-Brett, B. and Crow, G. (2012) ‘’Working with material from the Sheppey archive’,
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 15(4) July, 301-9.
MacDonald, R. et al (2005) ‘Growing up in poor neighbourhoods’, Sociology 39(5) 873-91.
Pahl, R.E. (1978) ‘Living without a job: how school leavers see the future’ New Society 2/11, 259-62
Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
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)
Weddell, E., Lyon, D., Crow, G. and Brett-Morgan, B. (2012) ‘Imagining the future’, Sociology
Review 22(1), September, 2-5.
Living and Working on Sheppey project http://www.livingandworkingonsheppey.co.uk/