Working with archived classic family and community studies: illuminating past and present conventions around acceptable research practice

Abstract

This article addresses the ways that working with archived classic family and communities studies from the 1960s can throw a different light on past and present research conventions around acceptable research practice. We consider the constitution of ‘good’ methodological conduct through looking at the nature of data and acknowledgement of who generates it, culminating in a focus on the implications of acceptable and unacceptable researcher accounts. Past conventions raise questions about the merging of primary data and context alongside which is active in the research field, while present understandings of ‘good’ ethical practice become a suspect narrative.

Keywords:

• archived community studies
• Dennis Marsden
• historical comparative analysis
• parenting
• Peter Townsend
• research conventions
• research ethics
• secondary qualitative data analysis

Notes

1. Economic and Social Research Council Grant No. RES-000-22-3337.

2. Phyllis Willmott made a similar contribution to Michael Young and Paul Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London study (Young & Willmott, 1957).