The Timescapes Study and Archive:

A Resource for Secondary Use

Bren NealeUniversity of Leeds

The Timescapes Study

First major Qualitative Longitudinal study, ESRC funded for 5 years

Enriching the UK Portfolio of longitudinal resources for secondary use

Consortium of five Universities, team of 37.

• Two dimensions of Timescapes

– Empirical research, key substantive themes

– Timescapes Archive as national level dataset

What is Timescapes about?

Personal lives, relationships, identities Families, intimacy, friendship, care, support Parents, grandparents, sons, daughters,

siblings, friends, spouses, partners, lovers, singletons

Engaging with the Temporal

Dynamics of personal lives – through life course and across generations

Intertwining of biography and historyTemporal framing: growing up, forming

relationships, bearing and rearing children, living in families, growing older, passing on.

MethodsTracking people, ‘walking alongside’ as their lives

unfoldUsing a rich palette of ethnographic methodsFinding out how change is created, lived,

experiencedSubjective understandings of causality, how and

why people move from a to b.Harnessing rich explanatory power of QLL enquiry

• Policy themes• Intergenerational care and support• Long term resourcing of families• Temporal issues of work-life balance,

social exclusion• Implications for life chances, health and

well being

• The 7 projects • Siblings and friends• Young Lives and times• Dynamics of motherhood• Masculinities, identities and risk• Work and family lives• Grandparents, social exclusion and health• The oldest generation

The Timescapes Archive

• Rich extensive documentary evidence about the dynamics of personal lives: gathered together to form a special collection.

• Written and audio accounts, diaries, drawings, film and photography.

• A national level data set for re-use among researchers in and beyond academia and future generations of social historians.

• Expanding the Resource• Sample size likely to double over first

phase of study• Five affiliated projects, e.g. tracking young

single people, people undergoing fertility treatment, the lives of disabled people, young black men and Chinese children and their parents.

• Building a Community of Users

• Archive based on principle of data sharing

• Affiliated projects: not just secondary use, but linking primary and secondary use in a live study

• A magnet for further research

• Setting a new agenda for the framing of qualitative enquiry. • E.g life course analyses of fatherhood

• Enriched portfolio of temporal resources

• Mixed method strategy for longitudinal enquiry. E.g. older life bid

• Comparability of data with QNL datasets• Collaborations with NCDS• Become a timescapes user!! • www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk