In Summer 2008 I commissioned a Part 1 Directive on ‘Doing Family History Research’ from the Mass Observation Project as part of a Leverhulme-funded project on the status and significance of genealogy and its role and consequences in personal and family lives. Drawing on examples...

The methodologies that might be best used to interpret Mass Observation’s distinctive research resources have tended to be considered on a case by case basis by individual researchers and have rarely been the subject of concerted, dedicated scrutiny. During 2009-10, however, the...

This paper explores the relationship between Mass Observation and sociological method. It will demonstrate that often this relationship has been an uneasy one with the detailed, deeply qualitative and broadly ‘unstructured’ data elicited by Mass Observation frequently positioned as...

The paper focuses on the relations between Mass Observation Reports, and the contemporary sociological valuing of articulacy, salience and coherence in participants' accounts. This is linked with a critique of sociological literariness, to question how participants’ words are transformed...

This article explores the perspectives of Mass Observation (MO) correspondents on crime investigation and application of forensic technologies in police work. Using the Panel’s replies to two distinct, independently commissioned Directives (the 2006 Spring Directive, Part 1 ‘Genes,...

By using examples from food and domestic life in England during 1950, this paper examines the use of narrative archival sources as a methodological alternative to researching everyday food practices by traditional research methods, such as interviewing. Through the analysis of three diaries...