Young Lives and Imagined Futures: Insights from Archived Data

On 15th November 2010, Timescapes and the UK Data Archive (UKDA) hosted a seminar ‘Young Lives and Imagined Futures: Analysing and Re-Analysing Narrative Data on Young Lives.’ The seminar investigated data on young people’s orientationto their future lives. In addition to engaging with time and young lives, the seminar also explored methodologies for primary and secondary analysis of historical and contemporary datasets. In this working paper we bring together two papers from this event: Graham Crow and Dawn Lyon’s ‘Turning points in work and family life in the imagined futures of young people on Sheppey in 1978’ and Mandy Winterton and Sarah Irwin’s ‘Youngsters’ expectations and context: secondary analysis and interpretation’. These papers are significant together because they both draw on secondary analysis projects, constructing new insight from archived data collected by others and for other purposes. These two papers draw heavily on similar kinds of data to explore young people’s lives and imagined futures, although in very different ways. Yet it is worth noting that they were never pre-designed to sit so readily side by side. There was no discussion between the authors at any point. It was entirely fortuitous that they offered, by the extent of their similarities and difference, stimulating insight about the possibilities of qualitative secondary analysis when placed side by side. Before introducing these two papers, we provide some insight into the context of the day. We can only map below the nature and diversity of the research that was presented and cannot do justice here to the complexity and richness of the research that was offered.