In this chapter, I consider ways of researching age. I start by discussing well-established strategies, before developing the case for alternatives. There are two key issues to bear in mind: how we as researchers collect or generate data that might cast light on age, and how we secure the necessary resources and then the relevant opportunities to achieve this. In particular, a critical question is how access is gained to older people, and the extent to which access may be biased towards particular categories. There is a constant risk that we end up (a) tackling questions set by funding agencies, or other stakeholders, who may have their own particular interests in the results of the research, and (b) engaging with people who want to participate in research in order to unload their grievances or the benefits of their own experience of surviving into later life.

The aim of much gerontological research is to understand the lived experience of growing older and being old. An obvious way of pursuing this is to talk to people, but conveying any kind of lived experience is difficult since it involves skills in articulation and performance. Here is a first-hand account of one such attempt. My aim was to capture my first experience of fieldwork in a seminar presentation in 1986. This had entailed interviewing men about working in the steel industry and, in particular, their recent experience of redundancy. This started in the summer of 1984, 19 years after I had left university and become a researcher. As I have explained in Chapter One, I was ‘piggy-backing’ a larger study of the impact of the 1980 redundancy programme of the British Steel Corporation on the local Port Talbot economy. I had become somewhat embarrassed that it had taken me so long to undertake any fieldwork myself, and, although the project was funded for only 12 months, something like six had passed before I embarked on my first interview. At the time I denied that I was putting it off, but looking back I am now willing to admit that I was apprehensive and uncertain as to how to start.