This book is doubly unusual. First, it does not argue a single hardshaped account of British social research, but a way into exploring its diversity. Second, it does not stand alone as a book, but is the frontispiece, the doorway, for a remarkable set of life story interviews. These 58 interviews are all available in full as both audio and transcript online, through both the UK Data Service and the British Library. You can find basic information on each interviewee in our Biographical summaries (see pp 219–231). For each interview there is also a summary, a brief bio, lists of publications and sets of text and audio highlight extracts. The audio clips can be heard through YouTube. So this book is the front door for a multimedia resource for all interested in learning and teaching about the development of British social research.

Essentially, it highlights the experiences and practices of the generations who were active from the 1950s to the 1980s, the crucial founding generations for today's social research scene. These were the decades which saw the final phase of colonial anthropology, the explosive growth of sociology in universities, and then the founding of theme-based women’s, ethnic and cultural studies and the development of ethical practices and systematic methodologies.

The archive started from the work of Qualidata, now absorbed into the UK Data Service, which was set up by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in 1994 to search out and rescue un-archived data from major post-1945 research projects. An earlier survey had shown how very few projects had safely archived their data, and many had been already lost or deliberately destroyed: among them Michael Young and Peter Willmott's famous studies of family and kinship in East London, John and Elizabeth Newson's 30 years of research on childrearing, all the fieldwork data from the two Banbury community studies, and astonishingly, almost all the data of all the early British black community studies. But Qualidata were able to rescue the fieldwork data of many other sociologists, including The Affluent Worker study of Luton car workers, Stan Cohen's work on youth and moral panics, George Brown's on women and mental illness, and Peter Townsend's national projects on poverty and ageing.