Methods Workshop: Qualitative Research Laboratory "Re-using Qualitative Data"
28 September 2005
The University of Manchester
Venue: Stopford Room, Refectory Building, Burlington Street
(off Oxford Road)
Workshop Outline
CRESC held its first Methods Workshop on 28 September 2005 at the University of Manchester. One of CRESC's innovations as an ESRC Research Centre is the creation of two linked methodological 'laboratories', a Qualitative Research Laboratory, and a Cultural Statistics Laboratory. These laboratories, figurative rather than physical, open up an intentional space in CRESC for working through methodological questions around researching socio-cultural change. This first workshop of the Qualitative Research Laboratory, on 'Reusing Qualitative Data', has emerged out of CRESC's interest in drawing on data from previous research projects to examine socio-cultural change. This dovetails with an increasing interest across the social sciences in reusing qualitative data. Yet despite the increasing turn to reuse, it remains a contentious practice, with continuing concerns about methodological pitfalls and clashes over its epistemological status. Bringing together speakers from the two major British archives for qualitative data (Qualidata and Mass-Observation), and two CRESC researchers, with a range of discussants from diverse perspectives: Corinne Squire (Centre for Narrative Research at UEL), Elizabeth Silva (Sociology, OU), Nick Hubble (Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston) and Jeanette Edwards (Anthropology, University of Manchester), the day aimed at opening up a debate that risks becoming polarized between those advocates of reuse and those more sceptical of the possibilities.
CRESC researcher Niamh Moore opened the workshop with a paper querying the 're' of 'reusing data', asking 'how does reusing qualitative data differ from using qualitative data?'. This question was taken up by Libby Bishop from Qualidata, who provided a rare detailed account of the process of reuse. Her account vividly demonstrated how her reuse of Mildred Blaxter's Mothers and Daughters dataset and Paul Thompson's The Edwardians dataset, both at Qualidata, led to her shifting the focus of her research questions and how in the way that she chose particular interviews to focus on, she was effectively constructing a different and new dataset for her project on convenience food. This paper thus provided an illustration of an argument gestured at by Moore, that reuse is not so much about reusing 'pre-existing' data, but that as Bishop noted, 'data are co-constructed whether reading or doing a live interview', and that attending to the process of co-constructing the contemporary dataset, rather than inherently raising new questions, which we lack methodological resources to deal with, can return us to existing practices for understanding qualitative research. This was followed by a paper from Sandra Koa-Wing introducing the work of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, and providing an account of some of the complexities of constructing an archive of data which is primarily intended for reuse. Mike Savage's paper told of his engagement with data from the Mass Observation Archive. While many accounts of reusing qualitative data look at how one particular study can be read and reread, this paper asked how we could use qualitative data to examine change over time, thus opening up new ways of thinking about the possibilities afforded by reuse. Specifically the paper looked at changing popular identities, here class, using Mass Observation data from the 1940s and from the 1990s. The day's discussions were put into a wider context with Jennifer Mason's illuminating concluding reflections on the place of qualitative data sources in the ESRC, drawing on her experiences on the ESRC Data Resources Board.
Niamh Moore's paper, '(Re)using Qualitative Data?'), will shortly be available on the CRESC website; and the intention is to publish a number of the papers as a themed section in a sociological journal. Next year, Autumn 2006, there will be another CRESC Methods Workshop, this time organised by Shinobu Majima under the auspices of the Cultural Statistics Laboratory.