Through the Interviewer's Lens: Representations of 1960s Households and Families in a Lost Sociological Study

In this paper we aim to use the interviewer notes from a lost sociological project to answer two broad, interrelated, questions: i) how was family life documented and represented by the researchers in their interviewer notes and ii) what does analysing interviewer notes in this way add to our understanding of families and households? The answers to these questions are considered in the context of a further question – why did the young worker research contain so much data on families and households when the research was concerned with young workers’ early workplace experiences? In answering these questions we offer some insight into family life in the 1960s as documented by the researchers and locate Elias’s young worker research within the context of the other large sociology research projects being undertaken at the time.