ABSTRACT
I begin this chapter with an explanation. To date, my experience of conducting secondary analysis has been in terms of reworking material collected while coworking on specific projects. I have not, as yet, revisited data from a substantially different timeframe to explore social change, but this is not due to lack of commitment or the want of trying. Over the last five years, Rosalind Edwards and I have put together various funding bids aimed at harnessing the value of 50-year-old data in understanding family change. While we have not yet secured a grant that would enable us to put our proposals into action, we have necessarily done a lot of thinking about the issues involved in attempting an historical comparative analysis of qualitative data. It is this thinking that forms the basis of this chapter. More specifically, I document some of the challenges we have faced in constructing a methodologically feasible proposal to investigate social change in parenting. Our aim was to revisit interview studies from the 1960s and compare them with contemporary data but, as I will demonstrate, this is far from a straightforward process. I begin with a brief discussion of some of the current debates around secondary analysis of qualitative data, exploring critiques of the process and their counter critiques. I then outline in more detail the particular research question we are hoping to explore through historical comparison. The rest of the chapter addresses the specific problems and dilemmas we faced in devising a method, as well as the potential for secondary analysis to contribute to understandings of social change.
