ABSTRACT
Since they first emerged from the positivist swamp, qualitative researchers have been generating impact. In the UK, scholars can look back to the dawn of the modern Welfare State in the 1950s, when the sociologists Peter Willmott and Michael Young established the Institute of Community Studies in East London, to undertake research that would both add to basic knowledge about society and illuminate practical questions of social policy. As seminal postwar texts emerged – on the effects of social policies on working class communities (Young and Wilmott, 1957); the emergence of new family ideologies and practices (Young and Wilmott, 1973); the ‘rediscovery’ of Britain’s prevalent post-Beveridge poverty (Abel-Smith and Townsend, 1965) (accompanied by Townsend’s co-founding of the Child Poverty Action Group) – it was the Institute’s impacts on social welfare and planning that established its preeminent position among British social research units (Platt, 1971). At the forefront was Young and Wilmott’s (1957) own Family and Kinship in East London, a study of the effect of post-war rehousing policy on a tight-knit urban working-class community. Acknowledged as one of the most influential sociological studies of the twentieth century, its use of social observation challenged reliance on social statistical evidence and offered new ways for social scientists to explain the workings and injustices of society, and inform the policies and practices that addressed them.
