THE PROJECT

1. MAKING THE LONG VIEW THE PROJECT QUADS DEMONSTRATOR PROJECTS Taking the Long View, based at London South Bank University, has been exploring innovative ways of overcoming ethical and practical obstacles to creating academic and non-academic access to a qualitative longitudinal (QL) dataset in the form of a ‘mini’, showcase archive. This exploratory project was funded under the ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS), a small initiative running from April 2005 to October 2006. Co-ordinated by ESDS Qualidata at Essex, the scheme is dedicated to the mission of learning more about sharing, representation and re-use of qualitative data, in all of its disparate shape and forms. THE DATA Inventing Adulthoods is a QL dataset that provides a unique window on most aspects of the lives of young people as they grew up in England and Northern Ireland at the turn of the 21st century during the decade 1996 - 2006. Aged 11-17 years in 1996 and 17-28 in 2006, the young people were growing up in in five very different areas of England and Northern Ireland spanning rural to urban. Tracing individual biographies, the study captures change over time. It combines three consecutive projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The first (school-based) study involved questionnaires (N=1800), focus groups (N=62) individual interviews (N=57), and research assignments (N=272). The other two studies followed 121 young people, largely drawn from these samples. OVERVIEW OF CASE DATA The dataset has considerable scope for methodological and theoretical advance and potential for application to policy, practice and education. Each round of interviews is stored and coded in NUD*IST, thus facilitating cross-sectional analysis. *data not available for all cases THE WORK Prepare a showcase mini archive Establish a network of dataset users THE UNFORESEENS • develop ethical and practical criteria for selecting, cleaning, anonymising, and representing the data for ten cases • participatory methods for re-negotiating informed consent with the ten relevant young people • a practical battle with the data set: re-collating from wave to case; searching for missing tapes, field notes and files; copying missing back-up tapes then concluding that digitising would be quicker and more effective • the enormous amount of time taken by a consultative approach to informed consent • the precarious nature of the huge investment made in preparing data a consultative approach involves • the need for a project web site which serves as: multi-functional tool for promotion/marketing; cumulative storage of material; taster for the mini archive; and user consultation • develop a network in the context of an ESRC-funded, large scale QL study beginning in February 2007 • Changing Lives and Times: Relationship and Identities Through the Life Course ('Timescapes') involves seven projects collectively studying the span of the life course • The Open University has already data for producing a course on ‘Youth’ (KE308) www.open.ac.uk/courses Establish the potential for using the mini archive • consult academic and non-academic users Disseminate project findings • web site, workshop presentations and articles www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods/

2. MAKING THE LONG VIEW THE SHOWCASE ARCHIVE The web site gives a taste of what the mini archive will eventually involve in its section on ‘The Study’. The archive is structured according to a timeline for the period of the study and to three concepts of time that evolved during attempts to grapple with analysing, interpreting and writing-up the study as a structuring device: Research Time, Biographical Time and Historical Time. Research Time describes the general methodological and theoretical story of the study, documents in detail each component study’s research tools, and provides a taster for the ‘researcher as research subject’ data that will be available in the eventual archive. Biographical Timeis a route into the rich accounts of individual young lives. It will provide the interface between the archived case data and the data user but, for now, offers a minimalist taster for the case data: a one-page overview of each of the ten cases, including: their biography and a list of their data. Historical time will provide an interface between the data user and the cross-sectional data, as well as contextual material on events, circumstances and environments the young people grew up in. Ten case studies have been cleaned, anonymised and digitised with a further fifteen digitised as part of the selection process. The longer-term archiving process will be a long one founded on a staged and exploratory approach. A further 96 cases remain, then the work on the cross-sectional data will need to be done. SOME LESSONS LEARNED Consent and confidentiality Recontextualising datasets • take a positive approach • whilst it is never possible to promise 100% confidentiality, negotiate with respondents on this basis • get the balance right between consultation and creating too much work for both researcher and researched, and between giving enough and too much information for informed consent • be mindful of the difficulty involved in managing the iterative relationship between data preparation and the consent process: investing intensive labour into a relationship that could fall apart • confidentiality, the control and ownership of data are often unclear and confused in research projects - a commitment to archiving data demands that these questions are distinguished and addressed • the issues involved in archiving and representing qualitative data vary in detail for each project • different users have very different needs in terms of contextualisation • when providing contextual data, establish boundaries between current work and that of future dataset users Managing data • consider if data is stored by case, cross-sectionally or both • continuously clean, anonymise and negotiate archiving consent • when making technological decisions (e.g. digital audio file type), balance quality and future-proofing with budget and storage space THE PROJECT TEAM CONTACT Adulthoods, Families and Social Capital London South Bank University 103 Borough Road London SE1 0AA Email: inventingadulthoods@lsbu.ac.uk Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7815 5821 Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7815 5893 URL: www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods/ www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods/