About the data
As part of his research on household labour and community life on the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and early 1980s, published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour, Ray Pahl had teachers at a local comprehensive school set a particular essay to those English students ten days before they were due to leave school permanently. The students were asked to imagine that they were nearing the end of their life, and that something had made them think back to the time when they left school. They were then asked to write an imaginary account of their life over the next 30 or 40 years. A total of 142 handwritten essays from both boys and girls were digitised for this collection.
How the data were used
The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives in Sheppey in this and the last century . The project, funded through HEFCE's South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Ray Pahl's earlier data. This part of the project replicates young school leavers writing similar essays in broadly similar conditions of economic recession. The project had coded up Pahl's original essays and is comparing and contrasting these against the new essays. Strong themes are emerging of hope, escape and constraint in the school leavers' imagined futures. The archived material has points of connection to long-standing debates in social science related to household formal and informal work strategies with links to ambitions, aspirations and fantasies. An early publication related to this research is Crow, Hatton, Lyon and Strangleman, New Divisions of Labour?: Comparative Thoughts on the Current Recession'.
About the author
Graham Crow is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Southampton University. His research interests include sociological theory, the sociology of family and community and research methods. Dawn Lyon is a sociologist in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at Kent University with a particular interest in the sociology of work.
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