Our central task in this book has been to guide the reader into an awareness of an intriguing set of interviews with twentieth-century social researchers that are available for further reading, listening and scrutiny. Through the fragments of these voices we sense something of the excitement of earlier days of doing social research in Britain.

These interviews all throw light on a common problem: how empirical social research was conducted and given shape in midtwentieth-century Britain. We have not aimed at a grand account of this history: we have referred to some more specific studies on this, and our own aims have always been much more modest. This is to put on record the fascinating stories of some earlier creative researchers working in intriguing new ways before they become forgotten. (Indeed, we have been a little surprised to find how already new generations have not heard of many of them.) We also wanted to capture something of the social and cultural contexts in which they worked and the dilemmas they faced. It is already – just a generation or two on – a very different world to the world of research we now live in. But we find all over these interviews the marks of the world we live in being gently shaped by some of these researchers. It is good to have them in the archive, on the record and full of future possibility.

On self-reflexivity

There are, of course, quite serious limits to our account: indeed, they illustrate some of the now well-documented problems of life story and oral history research. Our 58 interviewees cannot be taken as ‘representative’ of a wider scholarly pool. They are unique cases, and there are many other researchers who if alive and willing could easily have been included, and some who may have made even greater contributions and told very different stories. Nor can we be sure of the memories of our tellers; like almost all historical sources, whether created in the past or subsequently, what they say sometimes may be factually incorrect. Contemporaries shaped what they wanted recorded in documents, just as much as life story interviewees. Some facts which were once kept secret will be revealed in retrospect. Other facts will be reshaped – but this reshaping can be in itself a witness to changing consciousness. What our Pioneers told us was important to them.