Mark: Okay, so the first question then is, can you tell me how it is you became a sociologist? A bit about your background in your career?

Jocelyn: I went to Cambridge University where you could take two different subjects as an undergraduate. I did history part one and social and political science. I was involved in the women’s movement, in the early 1970s and in the socialist society and was very interested in politics.

I left in 1976 and my first job was doing a survey of outpatient departments in London teaching hospitals, which was a complete dead end! [Laughter] Very, very, very dull. I spent my days in clinics getting patients to complete questionnaires. Computing was in its infancy and you would punch the data into cards. Anyway, the survey was run from a department called Community Medicine (these days it would be called Public Health) and fortunately for me the head of the department told me about a master’s degree in sociology applied to medicine at Bedford College, London University. At the end of the master’s, and on the strength of it, I applied successfully to do a PhD in East London.

I had read a letter to the British Medical Journal by a bunch of A&E consultants who were insisting that the problem with their department at the London Hospital was that local people ‘misused’ it. Workingclass people had, what they described as, a ‘fatalistic approach’ to their health which made them incapable of using services appropriately: the doctors claimed their patients were leaving health problems too late and then turning up as emergencies.

I thought it was an outrageous letter, but it was enough to stimulate me to think “Well, why do people use the A&E department as they do?” Initially, I was going to do a comparison of beliefs in the working-class community – which was a famous community sociologically because of Young and Willmott’s (1957) work on family and community in East London in the 1950s – with the beliefs of people from Bangladesh. But I was persuaded by my supervisor that would be far too big a project so I did an ethnographic study of families and social networks in Bethnal Green and Hackney.