Between life course research and social history: new approaches to qualitative data in the British birth cohort studies

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.