ABSTRACT
The in-depth stories that are recorded are very powerful and worth hearing in themselves. There is both the contemporary documentation, and the reflective life-story interviews which were carried out in 1982. The research has reached some important conclusions. For example, the evidence shows powerfully how crucial grandparents are for most children who have lost a parent through separation or death. One immediate difficulty is an increasing doubt as to whether the sample, although certainly the soundest that any British research on step-families has used, was as impeccable as we had originally thought. It becomes increasingly clear to the authors that the fact that their interviewees stayed in a longitudinal study indicates a relative stability in their lives. The original interview schedules were already destroyed, and since most of the questions which they were asking had not occurred to the earlier researchers, there was simply no data for comparison.
