There is a notable absence in the methods literature of descriptions of the social processes involved in carrying out randomized controlled trials. In part, this is because social scientists have not much used this research design; in part, it is because those who have used it tend to approach it from a background which sees research as a mechanical process in which social values and processes are not implicated. In any description of the processes of carrying out our study, the role of the research midwives is pivotal. They occupied a peculiar, and particular, position within the research design: neither researchers nor researched, they were also both of these at the same time. Like the pregnant women who took part in the study, they did not set the research agenda or write the research protocol. They were asked to fit in with guidelines set by other people as to what the research was about, and how it was to be done. Unlike the study women, they were not themselves, as individuals, directly the subjects of data collection. And yet they also played the role of researchers, by going into women's homes with the technology of tape recorders and interview schedules, and by collecting and recording data. Most crucially, the research midwives’ own perceptions and experiences as ‘social supporters’ constituted a major part of the mechanism of effects the study was testing: the ‘success’ or otherwise of the study as a randomized controlled trial of social support in pregnancy was to be judged on the basis of the ways in which they interacted with the intervention-group women.

The title of this chapter comes from a remark made by one of the research midwives’ children on answering the telephone one day to one of the study women: ‘It's one of Mummy's ladies.’