ABSTRACT

This article discusses a new interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach to using data from the first British Birth Cohort Study, the National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD, 1946). It emerges from a collaboration between two historians of postwar Britain and a mixed-methods life course studies researcher. Our approach brings together cohort-level quantitative data with less well-known qualitative data from a sample of 150 participants’ original NSHD interview questionnaires to generate new perspectives on how macro processes of social change were experienced at an individual level and varied across the life course. The NSHD school-age and early adulthood sweeps included a series of open-ended questions relating to education, work, and social identities, which offer a sense of how participants responded to and understood the social transformations of the postwar decades within their everyday lives. This article explains our methodological rationale, before focussing on the wider analytical possibilities of our approach in relation to social mobility.

摘要

本文讨论了一种新的跨学科、混合方法，该方法使用来自第一个英国出生队列研究、国家健康与发展调查（NSHD，1946）的数据。它是两位战后英国历史学家和一位混合方法生命历程研究研究员之间的合作。我们的方法将队列水平的定量数据与来自 150 名参与者原始 NSHD 访谈问卷样本的不太为人所知的定性数据结合在一起，以产生关于社会变革的宏观过程如何在个人层面经历以及在整个生命过程中变化的新视角。NSHD 学龄和成年早期调查包括一系列与教育、工作和社会身份有关的开放式问题，让人们了解参与者如何在日常生活中应对和理解战后几十年的社会变革。本文解释了我们的方法论原理，然后重点讨论我们的方法与社会流动性相关的更广泛的分析可能性。