Research projects are rarely straightforward. However logically first planned, their success depends on negotiating misfortunes such as illhealth or interpersonal competition, and also rivalry between different groups in the wider research world. Here are some accounts of conflict and also of building up research groupings.

Difficulties in community studies

Colin Bell and Margaret Stacey on the Banbury Studies

Much was expected of Margaret Stacey's second Banbury Study. It proved a disappointment, and a turning point, the start of the decline of community studies. Colin Bell, lead fieldwork researcher, reflects on the tangle of intellectual doubts and personal difficulties which led to this crucial disappointment:

We have just heard the voices of Raymond Firth and W. M. Williams, two of our oldest Pioneers. Firth is setting out in 1928 on a lonely voyage into a new culture. He makes his solitary way to a remote island to study the way of life of its people. Ultimately published eight years later, his book, We, the Tikopia, became a classic of anthropology. Williams is describing how he studied a village in England. His book The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (1956) was one of the most notable British community studies. Through their voices we can sense the development of a new approach to research: an ethnographic approach less concerned with measuring, counting and science and more sensitive to feelings, understanding, imaginations. Firth was on his own and in a sense had to invent how to do his research as he went along. Helped a little by the earlier comments of missionaries, seamen and travellers, and the few cultural anthropologists before him, his work was full of risk. In his time there was scarcely any fieldwork training and not yet any manuals on how to do it. Researchers just had to get on with it. Williams came two decades later and he did have the benefit of some training and advice from his supervisor. This difference shows how things were already changing – and hints at how much they were to change!

So in this chapter we look a little at the early days of a ‘soft’ human methodology in the making in Britain. Some of our researchers went out into the field, and into the natural world, in order to understand different lives and human worlds through living very close to people in other cultures, trying to see and sense their world from their point of view. Like poets and writers, philosophers and dreamers, they wanted to understand human meaning, to capture the fragility of human inter-subjectivity, to become intimately familiar with human stories, and to document this for others. All this set profound challenges for good research: both practically and theoretically. This chapter will explore how this humanistic research style began to evolve. It will listen to what some of our Pioneer practitioners had to say as they struggled with these early first challenges to create a human social science.

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.

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.

This chapter focuses on the age-old debate in the social sciences about the primacy of methods and the relationship of our Pioneers to one of the main ideological battles blighting disciplines such as sociology. There are a variety of methods that are used in the social sciences to uncover different questions. They can be grouped into two main strands – qualitative methods (involving participant observation, structured in-depth interviews, unstructured interviews, and focus groups) and quantitative methods (such as secondary survey data analysis, and experimental methods) with a backbone of usually inferential statistical techniques. Every researcher makes a conscious decision to adopt a method in their social enquiry and it would have been extremely unusual for the Pioneers not to engage with a sometimes oppressive responsibility to pick a ‘side’, and the dogmatic prescription to stick with it.

For some of the Pioneers, the primacy of one of the methods over the other is undoubted. As we have seen, John Goldthorpe led two of the key projects in post-war British sociology, first on the Affluent Worker and then on social mobility. He became one of the strongest supporters of quantitative methods; and homage to survey techniques underlies the active current of his interview, and indeed of his career. He argues clearly for the importance of quantification in sociology to bring the discipline to scientific rigour. John sees British sociology as weakened by the debate and the rejection of positivism. In his own words:

Importantly, John was highly aware of how his academic standpoint brought him into an ideological war with his colleagues who were less interested in quantification, and ultimately brought about isolation from British sociology.

Researching on the margins heightens the possibilities of new insights, but it can also bring special dangers of both physical and emotional dangers, as these two voices tell.

Maxine Molyneux: fear in Afghanistan

Avtar Brah: the struggle in academia

Avtar Brah grew up on the edge of the colonial British Empire. Her family fled to Britain to escape racist persecution in Uganda. She not only became a successful academic, but also fought on the front line for the welfare and rights of other Asians in Britain. She chose at the very end of her interview to voice how, nevertheless, she still feels marginalised in British academic life.

Here we glimpse how the personal and family lives and their education and work experiences of our Pioneers helped to shape their research interests.

Childhood: class and Empire

Researchers often had sharp ears and eyes early in life. Those few, later to be professionals, who grew up in working-class families, could be brilliant observers of their childhood communities, vivid and perceptive.

John Goldthorpe: a Yorkshire mining village

Let us listen to how two of our earliest Pioneers set about their fieldwork – neither with much formal guidance.

Raymond Firth's voyage to Tikopia

In 1928, the anthropologist Raymond Firth – the oldest of our Pioneers, whom we have already encountered earlier – set out to spend a year on the Pacific island of Tikopia, which was to be the prime focus of his life's research. He was to be a lone researcher there, out of even radio contact with the wider world. It would be virtually impossible to organise a journey to such a destination in today's interconnected globalised world: a measure of how the experience of anthropology has changed.

So with no more than this scanty information, he packed his food stores, clothing and some equipment and presents, and launched himself into the unknown:

We have seen how research grows out of historical social conditions. As times change, so the problems, strategies and, indeed, the very methods of research are transformed. Even the histories of disciplines and research can come to look out of date very quickly. Reading A. H. Halsey's A History of Sociology (2004) is salutary: it shows how few women were involved before the 1970s, how there was a major neglect of race, and demonstrates the lack of interest in anything remotely postcolonial or ‘queer’. Halsey's important history, published only 17 years ago, already documents a very different bygone world: a much more gentlemanly and privileged world. The worlds of research methods and its subjects keep being constructed and reconstructed, moving on through time and space.

In this chapter, we take issues of class, race and gender as major examples. Ill-defined and often absent in research of earlier periods, these become key issues strategically developed through research fields and methodologies. We show briefly how by the mid-1980s a major multiple/intersectional research field of social divisions was being carved out – one that did not exist before.

Researching social class

As Frank Bechhofer recalled of the 1950s:

As Bechhofer's observation suggests, the 1950s were a prime time for interest in social class. It was not always so. A cumulative inventory of post-1945 researching on social class suggests four major emerging concerns that helped construct it: the long-standing evolving history of research on poverty; the popular interest in community studies and change; the growing awareness of just how education and culture was shaping society – possibly creating new possibilities for less privileged groups to advance in social life; and, finally, the growing concern with finding how to measure both class and mobility.

Here we bring together some of the ideas which our Pioneers drew from their own experience and felt important to pass on to future researchers.

Michael Young: an overview

Summing up his views at a time when he was in a perplexing restudy of his own early work, Michael Young was reflecting on effective research – by others as much as himself – which could help positive social change. He envisaged, at every stage in the research, space for creativity:

So what can the voices of our researchers tell us? Let us begin with some of their thoughts about the nature of creativity. Social researchers typically reach their most important discoveries through slow processes, beginning with observation, and building up interpretations through their own experience and also through borrowing from others. Transposing an accepted idea into a new concept can be a crucial step. But – especially it seems among men – there may also be vividly remembered moments in a life when a new key idea comes home to stay.

Why is there this difference between men and women Pioneers? It does seem that the men are more likely to tell a story in which they are surprised by their own success, but know that they performed well themselves: for example, John Bynner on the impact of his student survey, or David Butler on his first television performance. By contrast almost all our women Pioneers present themselves as working as part of a big social movement with shared new perspectives. Thus, when Sara Arber takes up gender and ageing, she knows that she will find inequalities in resources between men and women; and when she moves into the sociology of sleep, she is not surprised that women more often suffer from sleep disturbance, or that men snore more.

Meghnad Lord Desai: economists don't do fieldwork

Not all social scientists believe in fieldwork or observation. Meghnad Desai, whose many writings include a book on the power of landowners in India, describes his early experiences of rural fieldwork as fruitless. For him, listening to villagers is a waste of time.

To be recorded among our pioneers implies in itself some kind of success story in research: primarily in terms of intellectual discovery and influence, sometimes later linked to taking a key position in the academic world and achieving, in Colin Bell's words, ‘a degree of celebrity’ (p 15). (If you want to know more about who they all were, see the Biographical summaries on pp 219–231.) The engine of their success had to be the research work, but many of our Pioneers spoke perceptively of their lives much beyond this, especially their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. Thus, the sociologist Peter Townsend, whose single mother was a struggling singer, frequently away from home, described his grandmother as the emotional and practical ‘rock’ of his childhood: ‘Nowadays, I reflect a lot on the question of being an only child and what that means. It led, in part, to my enormous interest in family relations and extended family life, and the structure of families’ (pp 5–6). So, among our Pioneers, how did life experience feed creative research?

The influence of childhood communities

First, how were they influenced by the communities where they grew up? Almost half of our Pioneers were Londoners, but it is striking that only two, Peter Townsend and the social geographer Peter Hall, focussed on London in their early work. Of the others, some did local fieldwork on non-local issues, but half researched elsewhere in Britain or abroad.

There was a second important group, probably particular to the early decades in which sociology became established in British universities, who came from working-class families in the north of England. Throughout their research lives they shared a key concern with the significance and subtleties of social class: John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood on class and social mobility in The Affluent Worker (1963–69), David Hargreaves on school cultures, and Dennis Marsden with Brian Jackson on schooling and leisure in Education and the Working Class (1962) and Working Class Community (1972). Marsden and Goldthorpe especially spoke of the complexities of class differences in their own families and communities. But not all the northerners were so keen on this local culture. Thus, Raymond Smith grew up as a policeman's son in Oldham.