Surveying the meritocracy: The problems of intelligence and mobility in the studies of the Population Investigation Committee

Ramsden, Edmund

doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.013

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Its history is well documented (e.g. Kuh et al, 2011Kuh et al, , 2016Pearson, 2016;Ramsden, 2014;Wadsworth et al, 2005), and here, we only highlight key themes. Fuelled by concerns over declining fertility and maternal and infant health and mortality, it began in 1946 as a one-off survey of 13,687 babies born in England, Scotland, and Wales in one week in March of that year (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Population Investigation Committee, 1948).…”

Section: An Evolving Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Realising the unique opportunity afforded for exploring post-war social changes -especially the introduction of the Education Act in 1944 and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948 -its promoters reworked and extended the Survey, making it an example of 'big social science': large-scale researches in the 20th century that sought to document human life, at times aspiring for totality (Lemov, 2017). The NSHD was seen as a representative study of Great Britain, and it would play a pivotal part in policy debates surrounding education and health (Ramsden, 2014).…”

Section: An Evolving Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…One reason for the NSHD's broad approach is the ad hoc nature of its funding during this time, which required it to meet the priorities of state agencies and charities (Ramsden, 2014). Since 1962, however, the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) have provided core funding, transforming the NSHD to a leading epidemiological study.…”

Section: An Evolving Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

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Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive

Tinkler

Cruz

Fenton

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex temporalities that suffuse people’s lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments.

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Section: An Evolving Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Evolving Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

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Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive

Tinkler

Cruz

Fenton

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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“…There Douglas met and befriended the London School of Economics sociologist T. H. Marshall, who introduced him to Population Investigation Committee founding member and demographer David Glass. Glass hand-picked Douglas to direct the NSHD’s original investigation into maternity services (Ramsden, 2014: 132–3).…”

Section: From Maternity Study To Longitudinal Health Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 1961, the NSHD questionnaire given to school-leavers asked about career ambitions and contrasted these with those of their parents. 11 The NSHD’s findings played a ‘particularly important role’ in the Plowden Committee of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), which examined primary education and the transition to secondary education between 1963 and 1967 (Ramsden, 2014: 136). But the biggest shift came in the practicalities of administering the study.…”

Section: From Maternity Study To Longitudinal Health Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

From cohort to community: The emotional work of birthday cards in the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, 1946–2018

Elizabeth

Payling

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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The Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) is Britain’s longest-running birth cohort study. From their birth in 1946 until the present day, its research participants, or study members, have filled out questionnaires and completed cognitive or physical examinations every few years. Among other outcomes, the findings of these studies have framed how we understand health inequalities. Throughout the decades and multiple follow-up studies, each year the study members have received a birthday card from the survey staff. Although the birthday cards were originally produced in 1962 as a method to record changes of address at a time when the adolescent study members were potentially leaving school and home, they have become more than that with time. The cards mark, and have helped create, an ongoing evolving relationship between the NSHD and the surveyed study members, eventually coming to represent a relationship between the study members themselves. This article uses the birthday cards alongside archival material from the NSHD and oral history interviews with survey staff to trace the history of the growing awareness of importance of emotion within British social science research communities over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It documents changing attitudes to science’s dependence on research participants, their well-being, and the collaborative nature of scientific research. The article deploys an intertextual approach to reading these texts alongside an attention to emotional communities drawing on the work of Barbara Rosenwein.

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Eugenics, Population Research, and Social Mobility Studies in Early and Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Renwick

2015

Hist. J.

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Eugenics and sociology are often considered polar opposites, with the former seen as a pseudo-science that reduces everything to genes and the other a progressive social science focused on the environment. However, the situation was not quite so straightforward in mid-twentiethcentury Britain. As this article shows, eugenics had a number of important formative intellectual, institutional, and methodological impacts on ideas and practices that would find a home in the rapidly expanding and diversifying discipline of sociology after the Second World War. Taking in the careers of leading individuals, including

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Surveying the meritocracy: The problems of intelligence and mobility in the studies of the Population Investigation Committee

Cited by 3 publications

References 21 publications

Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive

Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive

From cohort to community: The emotional work of birthday cards in the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development, 1946–2018

Eugenics, Population Research, and Social Mobility Studies in Early and Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

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