At the end of February, the project researchers attended a workshop on Narrative and Mixed Methods research at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. The Centre oversees three British birth cohort studies. Data from the 1958 cohort, which includes more than 10,000 people born in Britain during one week in 1958, was used to illustrate the potential for combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, and use a narrative-based approach across methods.

Using a narrative approach allows researchers to explore how people make meaning of experience, how experience and meaning are shaped by context, and how people’s identities may be constructed by the stories they tell about themselves and their world. In the Pathways project, our interest in people’s stories about their experience of participation over their life times makes a narrative approach to data collection and analysis very appropriate. Traditionally, narrative has been associated with qualitative research, but the workshop leader, Professor Jane Elliot, explained that narrative is equally relevant in quantitative research – numbers ‘tell a story.’

Interestingly, the Centre for Longitudinal Studies is currently engaged in a piece of research focusing on social participation amongst a sub-sample of 1958 cohort members.  One of its aims is to try to understand why some members are more socially engaged than others. The Pathways team will certainly be following this research as it progresses.