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Lessons from restudying Sheppey

A re-study of the original research conducted on Sheppey Island, exploring the themes of work, unemployment, and family. Includes new interviews and analysis of archived essays.

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Lessons from restudying Sheppey

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  1. Lessons from restudying Sheppey Dawn Lyon (University of Kent) and Graham Crow (University of Southampton) Community Re-studies Nottingham, 12 April 2011

  2. The original study • Divisions of Labour (1984) based on an extensive, team-based, mixed methods project • Methods included essays written by 142 school leavers in May 1978 (mainly 16-year-olds, 90 boys, 52 girls), imagining themselves towards the end of their lives and looking back • Essays now archived at UK Data Archive • Speedy publication of ‘Living without a job: how school leavers see the future’ New Society 2 November 1978: 259-62; focus on themes of work, unemployment and family

  3. Context: Location of Sheppey

  4. Map of Sheppey

  5. The original study • The mass of data in essays is under-used: Pahl acknowledges that article doesn’t do full justice to essay material which ‘would be extremely hard to interpret without some knowledge of the local context. As this improves, I may wish to modify my present interpretation’ (1978: 262) • Analysis of young people developed further in Claire Wallace’s For Richer, For Poorer (1987), based on ethnography and questionnaires • Analytical theme of contrasting myth and reality (Pahl 1984: ch.7; Wallace 1987: 14) open to being developed further e.g. regarding migration

  6. The original study

  7. The original study

  8. The original study “One of the things about the Isle of Sheppey is that there does appear to be a slight low self-esteem amongst people, it tends to get put down by a lot of people, Islanders, and there’s lots of myths floating around. What was good about his [Pahl’s] report was that it cleared up a lot of those myths, showed them to be unfounded. One of the myths was that young people never want to travel off the island so their employment prospects are very low because they want to stay on the Island, they don’t want to travel.”

  9. The original study “But in his report he found that a tremendous lot of people commuted off the Island. A lot of young people went to Canterbury College and to schools in Rochester and what have you, so that wasn’t really proved to be true. It’s true that if you ask young people if they haven’t been off the Island much, they’ve been schooled on the Island and their first thought is if they’ve got to get on a train and change here and change there, it’s going to be a mission, but that would be the same for anybody leaving school.” (2009 interview with an original adult study participant)

  10. The original study • Important implication that responsibility for high levels of unemployment on Sheppey, including youth unemployment, in a period of recession are not because of lack of ambition – that would be blaming the victim • Re-analysis of 1978 essays aided by Pahl’s marginal notes on the essays including (on a few) ‘total fantasy’ ‘totally unrealistic idea of what he earns and what he gets – own house, car etc.’. Also aided by interviews conducted recently with Pahl • Revisiting archived material allows previously undiscussed themes contained in the essays to be explored, such as time and place

  11. The re-study 1 • Partial restudy in scope and time • People involved: • Universities: Kent (Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, Clive Arundell), Southampton (Graham Crow), Essex (UK Data Archive) • Community groups: Blue Town Heritage Centre (Jenny Hurkett, Alice Young), Swale CVS, Sheppey Matters • Volunteers: from the Blue Town Heritage Centre and beyond • Artists: ‘Tea’: http://web.mac.com/p.n.murray/www.teaweb.org/Home.html • Funding: South East Coastal Communities Project (SECC): http://www.coastalcommunities.org.uk/ (2009-2011

  12. The re-study: oral histories 1 • New interviews undertaken in 2010 by local interviewers trained by academics • Focus on memories of work connected to dockyard – an addition to Pahl’s ‘occupational community’ interviews (n=8, including 1 woman) • 33 new interviews, including 8 women • Half of the interviewees worked in the dockyard (including 2 women) • 8 have memories of the dockyard without directly working there • 7 of the interviewees worked in Blue Town in shops (butchers and newsagents), hotel, launderette etc • Evocative of everyday life

  13. The re-study: oral histories 2 ‘…that little shop [newsagents] was on the bike run for the dockyard workers that came into the dockyard. Hundreds and hundreds of bicycles each day which came from West Minster and all the towns beyond and Queenborough to work in the dockyard. And around about seven o’clock you’d hear the hooter go and my dad would say ‘right, you go and do the, the, the bike run’. And I had to go out and stand on the kerbside outside my dad’s shop and we would have newspapers rolled up with ten Weights or ten Woodbines in there and you’d hand them out.’ ‘So that was the situation, and I did this for years and every day, the biggest problem was getting your money […] So my father and I then on Saturdays had to go debt collecting!’ [laughter] (Harry Coombes, age 67, March 2010)

  14. The re-study: 2009-10 essays • New essays written in 2009-10 by ‘school leavers’ and youth group members • Sample more diverse (re age and stage of life) than in 1978: not simply comparing like with like • In addition, modes of communicating have changed as technologies and practices have developed - especially relevant for young people • Patterns of youth transitions have changed since 1978, e.g. greater chances of going to University, and longer life expectancy – several are written by people imagining themselves living into their eighties

  15. 2009-10 essays: family • Continuities in importance of ‘family’, especially children and grandchildren as focus of attention • ‘I’m going to have a family a boy and a girl, girl called Alice and don’t no about the boy, have a proper white wedding get a big house and support my family’ (male) • ‘I’m a widow with 4 children and 8 grandchildren and love our get togethers’ (female) • ‘When I turned 26 I had the best boyfriend ever and… I was pregnant. I had my baby and I called her Hope. I got married when I was 37 and my 11 year old was my bridesmaid’ (female) • Continuing relevance of discussions from 1970s/1980s study about family and marriage and how these are affected by economic change

  16. 2009-10 essays: work • Continuing importance of family as a route into work: • ‘Finally getting through collage with all my grades including a A in product design, all I now had to do was get a job at my grandad’s work’ (male); • ‘After being at college I started work on the farm where my dad got me a job’ (male) • And strong ambition to own one’s own business: • ‘At 32 I opened my own café in Sheerness High Street’ (female); • ‘by the age of 24 I had fulfilled my dream of becoming my own boss’ (male); • ‘I don’t want to just work for someone in a hairdressers, I want to be able to have my own salon’ (63, female)

  17. Comparison: education • Shift from boys’ aspirations of apprenticeship (34% in 1978) to university study (27% in 2010) • In 1978, 70% of girls did not imagine continuing post-16 education; in 2010, 19% did not • In 2010, similar proportions of girls imagine FE college (39%) and university (37%) • Subjects of study less gendered in 2010 than in 1978, e.g.

  18. Comparison: geographical mobility • Approximately half of essay writers in each cohort mentioned geographical mobility • Shift of location from dream of living elsewhere in UK to moving abroad • Move elsewhere in UK: 1978 - 15% of boys; 25% of girls • Move abroad: • 1978 - 11% of boys; 6% of girls • 2010 - 27% of boys; 23% of girls • Proportion of boys expecting to stay on Sheppey dropped (from 8% to 4%) but remained stable amongst the girls (6%) • Less than 10% across both cohorts anticipated moving away then returning

  19. Access to materials • Artists, Tea, produced DVD on Blue Town High Street - brought together memories of older people (voices) with old photographs of buildings, imagined future of buildings drawn by young people, and present-day footage along the street • Project developed website (not yet live) to be dynamic archive of oral histories, essays, visual and other materials on living and working on Sheppey

  20. Concluding thoughts 1 • Material from essays links in to wider on-going debates about young people’s ambitions, aspirations, plans, strategies, expectations, dreams, fantasies, and the best ways of capturing these • Different interpretations of material by different members of the research team, e.g. regarding ‘hope’ and ‘constraint’ • Oral histories relevant for thinking about occupational communities, loss, nostalgia, deindustrialisation • Project enabled community group to pursue ongoing collection of memories

  21. Concluding thoughts 2 • Continuity of context – place and socio-economic climate • Ongoing work: It would be fascinating to get accounts of what actually happened in the lives of the 1978 essay writers now aged 49 • In particular, what would they say about views expressed on ageing: ‘at 40, I can safely say my life had ended’ (male); ‘by 50 I was old’ (female)?

  22. References • Anderson, M. et al (2005) ‘Timespans and plans among young adults’ Sociology 39(1) 139-55 • Brannen, J. and Nilsen, A. (2002) ‘Young people’s time perspectives: From youth to adulthood’ Sociology 36(3) 513-37. • Brannen, J. and Nilsen, A. (2007) ‘Young people, time horizons and planning, A response to Anderson et al’ Sociology 41(1) 153-60. • Himmelweit, H. et al (1952) ‘The views of adolescents on some aspects of the social class structure’, British Journal of Sociology 3(2) 148-72 • Pahl, R.E. (1978) ‘Living without a job: how school leavers see the future’ New Society 2 November 1978: 259-62 • Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) • Thompson, R. and Holland, J. (2002) ‘Imagined adulthood: resources, plans and contradictions’ Gender and Education 14(4) 337-50. • Veness, T. (1962) School Leavers: Their Aspirations and Expectations (London: Methuen) • Wallace, C. (1987) For Richer, For Poorer: Growing up in and out of work (London: Tavistock)

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