Mass Observation Archive Research Articles

‘Methodism Alive’: Mass Observation's Worktown Perspective

Abstract This paper explores the potential of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex for studying the history of Methodism in Bolton (aka ‘Worktown’) during the middle third of the twentieth century, with particular reference to the years 1937–40 and 1960, demonstrating its value for recording the lived experience of Methodism. An appendix contains three key documents, two of them relating to the work of the Victoria Hall in the Bolton Mission circuit, which was much lauded by Mass Observation.

Views about Euthanasia and Dementia: Exploring Perceptions Utilising Evidence from the Mass Observation Archive.

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion in the United Kingdom regarding euthanasia and assisted dying, using data specifically related to individuals with dementia. A qualitative approach was taken with data captured via a set of written questions in the form of a Mass Observation Archive Directive. The respondents, known as Observers, provided written responses; there was no limit to the length of the responses and the Observers were able to provide as much or as little detail as they chose. The data were analysed thematically utilising NVivo software. One-hundred and seven responses were received, representing a range of beliefs, and with opinions regarding euthanasia and dementia with pro, anti, and uncertain views being expressed. Five main themes emerged during our data analysis: capacity, legislation, agency and personal philosophies, disquietude, and incumbrance. Consistent with previous research capturing public views regarding euthanasia and assisted dying for people with dementia, the findings suggest policy makers may wish to consult the British public regarding legislation regarding euthanasia and dementia.

Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19.

Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive's COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People were asked to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond? How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given? We find evidence of engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways.

Sustainable consumption by product substitution? An exploration of the appropriation of plant-based ‘mylk’ in everyday life

Many mainstream visions of sustainable societies assume that ‘green’ products will come to replace existing ones, reducing the footprint of consumption and enabling daily life to continue relatively undisturbed. However, several sustainable consumption studies have demonstrated that product substitution is not necessarily a straightforward process. This article asks whether the increased consumption of plant-based ‘mylk’, which is marketed as a more sustainable option compared to dairy milk, can be understood as a case of sustainable consumption via product substitution. The study applies a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey with secondary qualitative data from the Mass Observation Archive. We find that while the consumption of mylk has increased and that of milk decreased, this cannot be characterised as a straightforward case of substitution. Many people consume mylk alongside milk, rather than cutting milk consumption entirely. Rising mylk consumption requires the engagement of new, sometimes conflicting, meanings around health and the environment. In addition, a range of situational factors constitute unequal mylk consumption in society, and provisioning systems present important drivers and barriers that shape mylk consumption. Overall, our account suggests that moving towards sustainable consumption is not a simple process of product substitution as mylk is often consumed in addition to milk, and as this process requires adjustments in practices and meanings, unfolds unevenly within society, and is shaped by production systems rather than just demand.

The Second World War: Remaking the British Working Class?

In the post-war years, to the 1970s, most historians’ verdict on the Second World War was abundantly clear: it represented a watershed in social and political relations, shifting Britain in a social-democratic and more egalitarian direction. In more recent years, this verdict has increasingly been called into question. Some historians began to judge the war’s results, especially in terms of the flattening of social and gender hierarchies, to have been considerably exaggerated. Geoffrey G. Field has produced a sizeable, detailed and well-produced work which reaffirms the judgements of the ‘war as dramatic watershed’ school. He synthesizes much of the work on British society and the working class in the Second World War, interspersed with analysis of the vast holdings of The National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive, as well as film and literary sources. This review focuses on industrial relations, particularly the arms industries: where unionization, collective bargaining and workplace union organization were transformed. Joint production committees, however, proved ephemeral.

The Observers Observed: 'Reflections on making a film, The Day War Broke Out, with the Mass Observation Archive' by three PhD researchers

Elizabeth Chappell, Simon King and Dominique Baron-Bonarjee made a film, The Day War Broke Out, in the summer of 2019 as part of a CHASE film making training course led by film-maker Karen Boswall at The University of Sussex. The film focuses on the way in which the Mass Observation (MO) Archive came about. The film brings to life the materiality of the archive through voice, music, hand-written letters, historical objects and setting as well as through an interview with one of Mass Observation’s curators, Kirsty Pattrick. But what can we understand from the stated intentions of MO’s founders for anonymous volunteer contributors to write diaries ‘so that their [the public’s] environment may be understood and thus constantly transformed.’? This article takes the view that the ‘single voice’, i.e. in this case the personal reflective narrative, can offer a ‘way in’ to understanding collective lived experience. Exploring the research questions through three case studies, it offers a dialogical approach to the parallel and overlapping questions of how past lived experience can be brought to life on film as well as how researchers can use materiality to access the context of lived experience. It asks, how does the creative exploration of the archive through film offer the possibility of a more open dialogue to occur between researchers and curators? And finally, how can film making open up new vistas and avenues for researchers to share findings as well as to transform their own field of research?

“I am against Americanizing England. Ordinary TV does not seem to have an elevating influence”: class, gender, public anxiety, and the responses to the arrival of commercial television in the Mass Observation Archive, UK

ABSTRACT This article analyses (broadly lower middle-class) women’s responses to the arrival of commercial television in the UK in the 1950s, and seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of British women’s relationship to television, consumer capitalism, and modernity in the mid-twentieth century. While women are dominantly figured as especially prone to being seduced by commercial culture at this time, our analysis of material from the Mass Observation archives shows that women in this context were more likely than men to be resistant and hostile to the idea of “sponsored programming”. We also show how women’s responses reflected and reproduced elitist discourses about “Americanization” as well as the susceptibility of the working classes to the vagaries of commercial culture. We therefore call for a more nuanced and transnational conceptualisation of the historically shifting relationship between women and television.

'Subjecive Cameras': Authorship, Form, and Interpretation of Mass Observation Life Writings

The Mass Observation Archive contains a wealth of different forms of life writing created between 1937 and the mid-1950s, and again from 1981 to the present. This life writing, by contributors with differing intentions and levels of commitment, is fragmentary, dispersed across the archive, and takes varied forms. To make full use of the richness of this writing, it is necessary to know who the authors were, how their texts were generated, what forms of life writing resulted, and how they may be interpreted. This contextualising overview first outlines the specific and distinctive forms of life writing which MO initiated and encouraged; the social profile of their authors, and their self-perceptions of their identities; the writers' motivations; and their relationship to the Archive. It then explores some of the ways in which scholars have used and interpreted this rich material, both as a resource for investigating specific topics, and as a collection of life writings open to comparative analysis as narratives of self-construction and records of biographical trajectories.

Woven Tapestries: Dialogues and Dilemmas in Editing a Diary

Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) was an established novelist and political campaigner throughout her life. During the Second World War, she kept an extensive daily diary from her home on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland which she sent in instalments to the London offices of the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Until the 1980s, this diary, together with 500 other diaries for the same period, remained largely unread. It was stored as part of the valuable Mass Observation Archive which was deposited at the University of Sussex in 1970. Between 1982 and 1984 it was edited for publication by Dorothy Sheridan, the Mass Observation archivist, in collaboration with Naomi Mitchison herself. It was first published as a book in 1985 by Gollancz as Among you taking notes: the wartime diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945. This article is an account of the collaborative process of editing the original diary for publication and addresses questions of ownership, ethics and methodology raised by the process of editing life documents.

Older adults and “scams”: evidence from the Mass Observation Archive

PurposeThe issue of financial abuse is highlighted in the Care Act (2014). One category of financial abuse is consumer fraud or “scams.” Evidence suggests that scams are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, yet how scams impact older adults remains under-researched. The purpose of this paper is to report data from 80 older adults’ written responses to a Mass Observation Archive Directive, commissioned in autumn 2015, which focused on scams.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was used with data captured via written responses to a set of questions. There was no limit on the length of written accounts, and respondents remained anonymous. Data were analysed thematically, resulting in four key themes.FindingsThe data indicated scams impact individuals in terms of health and well-being, irrespective of whether they have experienced financial loss, and trigger implementation of strategies intended to avoid being defrauded. There was also evidence of scam-related stigma with individuals who are defrauded being subject to derision and censure.Social implicationsIndividuals who have been victimised by fraudsters may need access to practical and emotional support. This requires the design of appropriate interventions and the stigma associated with being scammed to be addressed.Originality/valueThis paper adopts an original approach to collecting rich, candid data about an under-researched topic. The authors highlight that anti-scam interventions should equip individuals to identify and avoid scams without inciting fear or anxiety; proposing this may be facilitated by drawing on health and safety risk assessment protocol when designing anti-scam interventions.

Women, sport and the people’s war in Britain, 1939–45

ABSTRACT Despite considerable progress over recent years, female participation in sport continues to be neglected by historians. This is as true in relation to histories of women as histories of sport. It is especially evident in the context of the historiography of the British home front in Britain in the Second World War. The extensive literature on women in the Second World War has generally been silent on sport and leisure. This article challenges assumptions that the war had little impact on the sporting lives of British women. Utilising newspaper sources, government and military documents, memoirs and the diaries and directives replies in the Mass-Observation archive, it highlights the importance of sport and leisure to women themselves as well as to the government, military and civil defence authorities. Because women were an important part of the home front, their morale, welfare and physical fitness mattered to those in authority. But the impetus for an extension of women’s sport also came from the women themselves, who pressed for the space and the opportunities to participate in sporting activity and extend the boundaries of women’s sport to a degree that had seemed impossible between the wars.

Observing America: what Mass-Observation reveals about British views of the USA

Since its foundation in 1937, the social research organisation Mass-Observation has systematically documented the opinions of a British public experiencing profound societal change. This includes the most extensive data available on grassroots attitudes towards the USA, from the outbreak of the Second World War to the final phase of the Cold War. Most of the scholarship on Anglo-American relations focuses on the political and diplomatic elites of Britain and the USA. The extent to which their interaction reflected and reinforced public opinion is seldom considered. This article uses the Mass-Observation archive to situate elite interaction within the broader context of public opinion. In so doing, it assesses the extent to which British political leaders have in their dealings with the USA represented the views of the electorate they serve.

The paradoxical habits of busyness and the complexity of intimate time-space

ABSTRACT Talk of busyness is everywhere. Obsessions with being busy mediate the temporalities of working and family life. The assumption that busyness is universal suggests a unified experience of temporality in the 21st century. This paper responds to this normative assertion through detailing the diversity of busyness detailed in three one-day diaries collated by the UK Mass Observation Archive on the theme of time pressure. The narrative analysis of the diaries responds to empirical and theoretical accounts of temporal variation to situate busyness in time-space. This analysis makes two contributions to scholarship on the geographies of temporality. First, it details how the negotiation of intimate time-space is framed within wider structural power relations. Second, it develops interpretations of habit though describing how everyday routines anticipate time pressure. Busy habits do more than respond to the demands of time pressure, they are also tactics to hold the body still while simultaneously moving it forward.

Brexit and the Everyday Politics of Emotion: Methodological Lessons from History

The 2016 European Union referendum campaign has been depicted as a battle between ‘heads’ and ‘hearts’, reason and emotion. Voters’ propensity to trust their feelings over expert knowledge has sparked debate about the future of democratic politics in what is increasingly believed to be an ‘age of emotion’. In this article, we argue that we can learn from the ways that historians have approached the study of emotions and everyday politics to help us make sense of this present moment. Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional regimes’, we analyse the position of emotion in qualitative, ‘everyday narratives’ about the 2016 European Union referendum. Using new evidence from the Mass Observation Archive, we argue that while reason and emotion are inextricable facets of political decision-making, citizens themselves understand the two processes as distinct and competing.

‘Between-time stories’: waiting, war and the temporalities of care

This article analyses how World War II shifted and contained embodied experiences of waiting in relation to broader ideas of lived time in modernity. The trench warfare of World War...

THE APPLICATION OF MASS OBSERVATION DATA IN SOCIAL RESEARCH

Responding to the opportunities and challenges of an ageing world the University of Chester established the Centre for Ageing, Mental Health and Veterans’ Studies in 2013 to provide research, consultancy and education, with the aim of promoting innovation in health and social care services for older people. This symposium brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and career stages, to explore the utility of Mass observation data in social research in the field of gerontology. The Mass Observation Project, established in 1937, documents the lives of ordinary people living in the UK, and explores a wide range of social issues. The symposium comprises four separate papers. The Methodological Relevance of Mass Observation Data: This preliminary overview will outline the mass observation archive, highlighting challenges and issues encountered utilising the data produced in social research. Personal Narratives of Ageing: This paper presents personal narratives reflecting on the ageing process, and growing older in the UK. The Health Impact of Scams: This presentation will offer new and alternate insights into ‘scams’ and the health effects of fraud on older people, using data from the mass observation directive commissioned by the centre. Perceptions of Dementia: This paper presents a perspective on the public knowledge and understanding about dementia not previously considered, where respondents have written openly about their own experiences, and reflected on their perception of the wider public’s knowledge and understanding about dementia.

Gambling, Status Anxiety and Inter-Generational Social Mobility: Findings from the Mass Observation Archive

This article is located within sociological research exploring the subjective experiences and emotional consequences of social mobility in the UK. It adds to recent attempts to examine the role of everyday cultural practices in making sense of journeys of upward mobility. The article draws on these theoretical advancements and applies them to a case study of everyday gambling practices using qualitative data ( N = 24) collected from the Mass Observation Archive. The article represents one of the first attempts to examine the connections between social mobility and gambling. It draws on sociological research that explores the cultural as well as the economic underpinnings of social mobility and connects this to research examining the inter-relationships between gambling and class. By doing so, it aims to present a novel theoretical approach to the study of gambling as everyday consumer practice; one which can be understood alongside broader cultural and structural inequalities of class.

Queuing as a Changing Shopper Experience: The Case of Grocery Shopping in Britain, 1945–1975

Queues are part of everyday routine and experienced by most shoppers, yet little attention has been given to providing historical accounts of queuing as a consumer task or as a shopper experience. This paper examines grocery shop queues and the changing experience of shoppers in historical perspective, specifically focusing upon the shift from counter-service to self-service grocery formats in Britain from 1945 to 1975. The paper draws upon a wide range of material using evidence from oral histories and witness groups, which is supported by contemporary sources from the Mass Observation Archive, newspapers, shopper surveys, and trade publications and reports. The conceptual framework developed in the paper explores the public and private dimensions of queues to consider the experiences and perceptions of shoppers during a period of rapid change in the retail grocery system. More generally, the paper contributes to our understanding of how management innovations are connected to untraded public values.

Typewriting Mass Observation Online: Media Imprints on the Digital Archive

This article examines how the digital is politicizing medium within historical studies. Through a critical evaluation of Mass Observation Online (MOO: the online portal for the Mass Observation Archive), the paper traces how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has established a new hierarchy in a key archive of British social memory, centred around the typewriter, whose products are much easier to digitize. It shows how a new economy of representation has been created based not on what Observers wrote, but what they wrote with. This has serious historiographical consequences for research drawn from MOO. Typewriting during the interwar period was connected to wider historical forces, including changes in white-collar work, gender roles and cultures of representation. Privileging typewritten material, therefore, is changing how we understand MO materials: from the constitution of the national panel, to the identity of observers, the form and content of materials, and the nature of life-writing. This distortion is not limited to MOO, but the digital has made medium a key site around which primary source materials, archival collections and digital interfaces are being structured. As historical collections are increasingly accessed through digital interfaces, it is argued that increased attention must be paid by historians and archivists to the historiographical dimensions of media and its impact on digital historical collections.

Mass Observation and the Emotional Energy Consumer

Understanding how people lived with energy in the past is becoming increasingly important as policy-makers are paying more attention to the social and cultural factors that condition energy consumption and fix energy demand. This is challenging historians to demonstrate the ways in which energy systems are more than just physical infrastructures set into the built environment but activated by users with complex emotional lives. This article goes some way toward developing this history, building up a profile of the emotional energy consumer. To do this it draws upon a collection of material from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA), University of Sussex, which provides unique access to the emotions British users brought to their energy systems. Drawing upon a series of Directives written in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the article considers how energy demand was shaped by the complex emotional cultures of Thatcherite Britain. The article proposes two different approaches to do this. The first approach considers how observers rooted emotions about energy in longer individual and social timeframes. This uncovers the importance of time in fostering emotions toward energy, from the lived experience of transitions, to the social memory of World War II and circulating rhetoric about the future. The second approach considers how emotions — such as sentimentality, nostalgia, love and fear — structured energy choices and led to particular configurations of energy use in the home. By demonstrating how emotion mediated between observers and their energy systems this article argues for the necessity of developing histories of energy focussed not only upon energy systems but that centre the complex subjectivities of users as well as their emotional cultures.