Secondary Analysis of Dennis Marsden

• Main Authors: Tanya Evans, Pat Thane
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2006-08-01
• Series: Methodological Innovations
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4256/mio.2011.0013

A secondary analysis has been made of 116 interviews with unmarried mothers carried out by Dennis Marsden in the mid-1960s. These are now held at ESDS Qualidata, University of Essex. They are being used in a wider study of unmarried motherhood in Britain since 1918. There are significant differences in research practices then and now: the interviewer did not obtain the interviewees consent to use the interviews in his research; the interviews were not recorded and transcribed verbatim, but reconstructed from notes and memory after the interview; the reconstructed interviews contain personal comments by the interviewer about the interviewees which would not now be acceptable; the interviewer was much less aware of the importance of class and gender dynamics in an interview situation than would now be the case. Hence the interviews are revealing about the history of social research as well as about the history of unmarried motherhood. These methodological changes mean that, like all sources. The interviews have to read be critically and with caution. Nonetheless they are revealing about the experience of unmarried motherhood in the mid-twentieth century.