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Using interviews, the media
and Mass Observation to
research the family history
boom
Dr Anne-Marie Kramer
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Research Methods Festival, Oxford
Wednesday 7th July 2010
[email protected]
The family history ‘boom’
 Unparallelled public access to historical records
 New technologies
 Celebrity genealogy TV programmes
 Personal and family biographies & ‘rootedness’ remain
extremely important & foundational to identity (Kramer,
forthcoming)
= Booming family heritage industry
The research project I
 ‘The cultural status of genealogy’ – Leverhulme funded
Early Career Fellowship (Aug 2008 – present)
 Explores the meaning and consequences of the current
boom in UK family history research for the individuals
undertaking it, their families, and British society more
broadly
 Interested in exploring how family history research
functions in the personal life of individuals and families
in relation to ‘connection, relationship, reciprocal
emotion, entwinement, memory, history’ (Smart, 2007:
189)
The research project II
 Investigates how the meaning of family history is understood
broadly within British society.
 Locates the family history phenomenon in relation to personal
life
Asks:
 what has stimulated the appetite for family history research
or the quest for ‘rootedness’, and what sustains it
 what a focus on family history can offer to our understanding
of how connectedness, relatedness and affinity function to
mediate and structure personal and family lives.
Beyond the in-depth interview
 Sociologists need to innovate in terms of the
methodological resources they use, going beyond the indepth interview and the sample survey (Savage, 2007)
 A return to sociological description (Savage, 2007)
 Treating documents as more than inert texts, but actors
in their own right (Prior, 2008)
Sources
 Media analysis:
Broadsheet newspaper coverage of FHR (2000 –
2008)
TV analysis (Who Do You Think You Are?)
Genealogy magazines (6 monthlies)
 Mass Observation Directive, Summer 2008 Part 1 on
‘Doing Family History Research’
 Interviews with archivists, professional and amateur
family historians
Levels of analysis: who to
research?
 Investigating the ‘boom’ – but from whose perspective?
 National – familial – individual & personal identities
 Multiple viewpoints: those identifying as family
historians; those interested but not active; those with a
family member involved in it; those actively ambivalent
or hostile
Levels of analysis: Working with
multiple texts
 Media saturation of everyday life: public representation
of family history plus how media texts function and
saturate personal lives
 Written versus oral responses
 Weaving the strands together