biographical methods

Depositors:
Prof. Sean Ó Riain (Department of Sociology and NIRSA, NUI Maynooth), Dr Jane Gray (Department of Sociology and NIRSA, NUI Maynooth), Dr Aileen O'Carroll (Department of Sociology and NIRSA, NUI Maynooth)
 
Description:
In this project qualitative interviews were conducted with a large sample of Irish people from three key birth cohorts: 1929-1934; 1949-1954 and 1969-1974.
 
Listen to audioclips from Life Histories and Social Change. (Sound clips here are taken from interviewees who indicated on their ethical consent forms that they were willing to be identified.)
 
These cohorts enabled us to interview people reaching adulthood in the crucial decades of the 1950s (an era of socio-economic decline), the 1970s (an era of initial "modernisation") and the 1990s (the "Celtic Tiger" boom). The interviews included both a qualitative, ethnographic component, in which the respondent framed the life history according to the events, circumstances and interpretations that are significant to him or her, and a systematic component (life history calendars and network schedules) that will provide comparable data across cases. The interviewees were selected from a nationally representative sample of people interviewed from 1994-2001 for the Irish part of the European Community Household Panel Survey.
 
Access this dataset
View Catalogue Record for Life Histories and Social Change
 
Clips from the Life Histories and Social Change project were used in the development of the IQDA Teaching Resources. 
 
 
Status:
Phase one and phase two archiving completed and interview transcripts are now available. Some of the interviewees have agreed to being publicly identified. However the majority of the data will only be available to bona fide researchers who have signed legal access agreements that guarantee ethical re-use of the data. Access to a small number of the interviews maybe closed for a number of years.

Family Rhythms

The Family Rhythms project aims to re-vision family change in modern Ireland in light of recent theoretical developments, through an in-depth analysis of newly available qualitative data resources held in the Irish Qualitative Data Archive.

View the presentation on Family Rhythms, exhibited to coincide with the inaugural lecture of President Philip Nolan, National Univeristy of Ireland, Maynooth on the 16th of February 2012

The research will examine changes in the textures, meanings and rhythms of family life in order to develop an understanding of the processes underlying changing demographic structures, to be reported in a state-of-the-art textbook.

The project will incorporate a parallel knowledge transfer initiative to disseminate learning from our experience of re-using qualitative data in family research, and to promote sharing and re-use of qualitative data.

The research has been funded by a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

DASISH

In 2012, the EQUALAN network will come together in a qualitative data workshop funded as part of the FP7 Infrastructures Project, DASISH.  The workshop will inform the members of EQUALAN about DASISH and develop a plan for how they can be involved. More details about the workshop will follow soon.

RACcER (2009-2010) 

Making data accessible is increasingly part of national research policy. For example IRCHSS requires that “whenever data is to be collected with the support of a grant awarded by IRCHSS, applicants must specify the means by which that data will be made available as a public good for use by other researchers.” However, archiving qualitative social science data and making it available for re-use can present practical and ethical obstacles to researcher compliance with this policy. This project on “Re-use and Archiving of Complex Community Based Evaluation Research” (RACcER) worked towards enhancing the ethos and practice of qualitative data archiving in Ireland through a major demonstrator project that examined the challenges facing researchers. It involved the design and implementation of creative ways of overcoming those challenges, and the development of best practice guidelines.

RACcER developed and established a knowledge transfer relationship between the Tallaght West Childhood Development Initiative and the Irish Qualitative Data Archive housed in the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth. More ...

Family dressed for the weather for V6491

By high tide this part of the sandy beach was covered and the water was on the shingle. This family seemed well dressed for the weather that day.

  © Copyright Linda Bailey and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence