Mildred Blaxter (life history interview)

As part of a series of interviews on 'Pioneers of Social Research' Professor Paul Thompson has interviewed Mildred Blaxter. This interview took place in August 2002 in Norwich.

How she got started in sociology

PT: Yes. So which year did you go to Aberdeen?

MB: About ... '65.

PT: Yes. Okay. So you're living in Aberdeen, and then what sort of work did you start?

MB: My husband was director of, went to Aberdeen as director of an institute there, the Rowett Institute, which is just outside Aberdeen. I stayed, I lived in Aberdeen, performing this function of "The Director's Wife", which in an old-fashioned, an old-fashioned society like 1960s North-East Scotland, was ... you know, was a job of its own.

PT: Did you like that at all?

MB: No, I didn't, at all! (LAUGHS) However, I did it dutifully for a little while! And then decided I'd done enough, you know, the children were all now at school, even the youngest, and so I decided it was time to find a life of my own again. And by this time, I had decided I wanted to do sociology.

PT: So how was that?

MB: I think I have to say Peter Townsend. I have to say it was another book. I have to say that I started out with Peter Townsend. I don't know how I came across these, but I got fascinated by that whole school of writing, and went on from there to People of Ship Street, Coal is our Life, Family Life in East London, Education and the Working Class, that whole tradition of brilliant, old-fashioned, British welfare/Socialist, descriptive sociology. And I thought, "Yes. That's what I want to do". "And that's sociology, so I'll go off to university, and I'll do sociology, if that's what sociology is". I mean, I wasn't quite right in that, but that's what I thought.

PT: And Peter's book was The Family Life of Old People?

MB: The Family Life of Old People, yes.

PT: So you went to Aberdeen University?

MB: So I went to Aberdeen University and did another first degree, in sociology.

PT: And so who was teaching you there that was an influence?

MB: Oh, enormous numbers of people. And it wasn't quite what I'd expected, of course, from my reading, it was something else. Raymond Illsley was Professor of Sociology at the time, and he had attracted a group of young lecturers - Phil Strong, Alan Davies, Gordon Horobin - who were all obsessed with the new ideas that were just coming over the Atlantic, and it was such an exciting time. The ideas of Goffman and Garfinkel and Schutz, and Bulmer, and they were into ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism and so on. This was a considerable shock to me at first, as I think it is a lot, even to students nowadays, you know, although it's old-fashioned now, but then it was absolutely new, you know. It took me a long time to grasp the ideas of symbolic interactionism or constructionism, or what you will, you know. They used to play games, these young lecturers, that I think are quite common, of running tutorial groups by refusing to say a word, in order to demonstrate something about roles, or encouraging student groups to go and argue with a preacher in church, or sit down in a supermarket and have a picnic, to demonstrate something about expectations, all this sort of thing - very Garfinkel stuff, you know. And I was much too old and respectable for such childish games, you know, and I refused to have anything to do with this! (LAUGHS) It took me a long time to get hold of it, and I think, today, that the lecturers found me just slightly difficult, because I was older than all of them, you know, I was in my forties by this time. And I had too much experience in the relevant areas, i.e. we're talking about the Health Service, 1946, and parenthood and politics and all sorts of things, you know, I had actual experience of these and they didn't. They were talking from theory. So they found me ... and I had to be very careful to keep my mouth shut, and I wasn't always successful! I think they found me difficult, and I found them difficult. So it wasn't easy at first. But, slowly, somehow all this seeped in. Then in 1967 ... 1967 I went, started the degree. In 1970, Rendell, who was Director of the Medical Research Council, Medical Sociology Unit, as well as being Professor of Sociology in the University, he invited me, when I'd finished the degree, he offered me a job at the Unit. At the same time, all these people moved over from the Teaching Department at Aberdeen, to the Unit, so there was this whole group of people at the MRC Unit, which was in the hospital grounds at Aberdeen, in a Nissen hut, when I first joined.

Her early exposure to and use of qualitative methods

Raymond got a Programme Grant from SSRC, a large Programme Grant, to do a series of studies of relationships between professionals and clients in the whole range of health and welfare settings, specifically meaning to explore the new symbolic interactionist methodologies. Now, this was surprising, for MRC. I mean, this was 1969, I suppose, and, you know, and admirable for Raymond, in order to cater to this group of people. So he got us all there, and later added - a little later - added people like Sally MacIntyre, Janet Ascombe, Mick Bleur, Rory Williams, and later still, people like Bob Dingwall, Gilbert Smith, Tony Walters - anyway, a whole group of, at that time, and all except for me, young, like-minded people who were interested in these new methodologies. And we talked and talked and talked.

PT: Where did you talk?

MB: At the Unit, you know. We had a common room, and the common room was the scene of where most of this went on, you know. And we were all, we all took different subjects, it resulted in books, like Sally McIntyre's Single and Pregnant - on pregnancy and motherhood, abortion and motherhood. Phil Strong's, The Ceremonial Order of a Clinic - on child health. My own was on disability. A whole series of books. We were all inventing our own methods as we went along. I think this is terribly important. It was before qualitative methods had solidified. Yes, Glazer and Strauss, we all knew about grounded theory. When was grounded theory? '69? Some time then, isn't it. Yes, we all knew it and said, "Great!" you know, "This is a marvellous way of doing one's qualitative research". But we all wanted to do something different, so we were all doing something different! (LAUGHS) Each of these books that I've talked about, if you look at them, you'll find they all have a methodological appendix, and this doesn't necessarily happen nowadays, you know, because methods are taken for granted. But we've got an appendix explaining what we were trying to do, in each of those books. So we were all doing qualitative research, which was very much based on symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, it was more or less theoretical, depending upon taste. But it wasn't just pure sociology theory, because it was paid for by, at that time, SSRC, and it was under Raymond's guidance, so it had practical purpose. It was about health and welfare services, you know, and it had to have some practical implications, to say something about these systems, or these professional relationships, or something. So it was an amalgam of very practical Health Service stuff, with a fairly high level of theory, I think. But it wasn't just theory building, you know, it was theory building in the service of ... or, perhaps, perhaps the practical in the service of theory, I don't know quite which way round I put it. I think that was its distinctive character. But we were all conscious, I think, it was a bit exclusive and secluded. We didn't mix much, I don't think, this group, with the wider sociology.

How to analyse large quantities of rich material.

PT: I think one of the big difficulties is that you get all this very rich material, and then you have to leap from that to some kind of analysis and interpretation. I'm wondering how you handled all this diverse information, to get that interpretation?

MB: Well, I had some frameworks, of course, of what I had initially suggested were the available frameworks into which people could fit. There are frameworks of medical practice, and rehabilitation services practice, and law, and social work practice, and welfare benefits and so on, there are all these frameworks, all these labels available. So that gives you an initial framework, of approaching the way people talk of their condition, in medical terms, to see how it fits into the medical framework, or how it fits into these other frameworks. So that gives you a framework to start with, for analysis. Then it was simply a question of carrying that forward longitudinally, deciding what the implied prediction, of behaviour or interaction was of this definition. "This man has been told he will never go back to work, therefore, what will happen?" He will be given benefits, such and such, and such and such. He may decide that he is so disabled that, you know, life is over for him. That may have all sorts of reaction upon his own definition of himself, and what about his family, what do they make of this, you know? Does his wife decide that she's going to go out to work, and does this spoil the balance of the family, or whatever? But, come back, is that exactly what happened, or is it not? I mean, it may not have. And if it doesn't, why not? (LAUGHS) And what happens next, you know. (LAUGHS)

And, you know, I just have some lovely lovely stories from this point of view. One of my very favourites was the man who - I mean, some of them are terribly tragic - but one of them is the man who sat, in a council house - his wife had left him long before - surrounded by all these children, for whom he was the sole carer, sat there, perfectly happy, and very openly talking to me, surrounded by a doctor who didn't really think he was chronically and permanently ill, but was very sympathetic to him, because he thought he was a great chap, he was looking after these children; and a social worker who thought that he had to be defined as disabled, no matter what, because if so, she was going to be landed with, I can't remember how many of these six children! You know, if he wasn't given the right benefits, what was she, the social worker, going to do with six children! The Employment Rehabilitation Service were saying, "But there's nothing wrong with this man. Why can't he go back to work?" (LAUGHS) And so on and so on. And he was surrounded by other doctors, the specialists from the hospital and his GP had different opinions of him. I even talked to his neighbours. He was sat there, surrounded, at the centre of this web of totally conflicting definitions, with enough savvy to manipulate them all, and get on quite well! (LAUGHS) So that was one example.

The Mothers and Daughters project-funding challenges for qualitative work

PT: We were talking about the "Mothers and Daughters Project". So can you describe the project, and what you were trying to do?

MB: Right. As I said, it was in this Transmitted Deprivation framework, and there seemed to be such an opportunity, in Aberdeen particularly. We're going back to Dougal Baird now, because there'd been so much research through all the generations, and through the past generation or two of child-bearing women. So if we're talking about transmitting deprivation through generations, you've got an ideal population here, which was heavily documented. Is the Transmitted Deprivation the first programme? I think it probably was. ... [That] any governmental body, was actually brave enough to instigate, actively for purposes of theory-testing, theory-developing, that was quite something, wasn't it! So all the items in it were supposed to be specifically a test of this hypothesis that deprivation was transmitted from generation to generation. Despite this boldness, I have to say that the sociological establishment and SSRC itself, was not entirely easy to persuade that qualitative research was the way to look at this. I remember, very distinctly, being called down to London to defend this proposal. I remember it, particularly, because at the old SSRC building on the Embankment there, there was a bomb scare - it was the time of bomb scares - and we were all turfed out! And we all stood outside for some time, and then the Chairman of this particular committee, I think it was Brian Abel-Smith, as I remember, said, "Oh, we can't waste all this time, we'll go ahead". So we sat down on the Embankment, on the grass on the Embankment, and went on with this interrogation of me, about my project, with me in the middle, and everybody else - all these eminent sociologists, whose names I can't absolutely remember - sitting (no, I don't think George Brown was one of them) sitting outside me, in a ring. All very strange, because the passers-by, walking backwards and forwards, and occasionally stopping to listen, and being very interested in what was going on, and nodding sagely, and saying, "Yeah, that sounds interesting. Give her the money!" (LAUGHS) And I'm sure that that's how I got the grant for Mothers and Daughters, because they weren't at all inclined to give it to me! But after all that, you see, they absolutely couldn't! They did, to begin with, tend to say, "Well, where's your control group?" you know, and "How are you going to prove this?" and so on.

Methodology design - construction of the sample

Anyway, my idea was that I could look at two generations of women, because there was this previous generation whose child-bearing had been so extensively documented by Dougal Baird, if one could trace some of them, and trace their daughters, of the individual women, and their daughters, and the daughters who were still living locally, then you might have the perfect test of this hypothesis. Because if the hypothesis were true - might really be expected to transmit deprivation - you might have a group who were deprived in the older generation. You could choose a group who were deprived in the younger generation, always in contact, so they weren't geographically mobile, they were neither socially nor geographically mobile, they'd been deprived for two generations, and in the same place. And if nothing was transmitted there, then that was a very good test of the hypothesis, you know.

PT: This sounds rather like The Affluent Worker technique of looking at what would disprove your hypothesis.

MB: Yes. Absolutely, yes.

PT: But did you have anything like that in mind?

MB: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of the Programme did, I think a lot of the Programme was premised on that. Very little of it looked to prove it, because nobody believed it - I mean, ideologically, nobody was prepared to believe it, so they weren't looking!

PT: And just another point, this earlier case material, that was held, personally, by Dougal Baird, or was it in an archive?

MB: It was held by the Unit, because it had been done through the Unit, and it was held in the Unit after that.

PT: So that, at the time, was a somewhat unusual thing, that you had a set of earlier material?

MB: That wasn't qualitative, that was simply factual. It was medical, obstetric, social work.

PT: Case-work notes?

MB: Yes. Yes. Work by Barbara Thompson, who was another of the Aberdeen original family, who had worked with Dougal Baird, and who had collected social data about these women, and their behaviour throughout the early child-rearing, you know, and nutrition habits, and parenting habits, breast-feeding, all that stuff.

PT: So it was pretty fully detailed.

MB: Mmm, yes.

PT: But no actual quotes from [the women]?

MB: No, no actual qualitative data, no. So it was simply a question of finding these women. Which, you see - Aberdeen, as you'll know, was - is or was - a fairly unmobile society! I mean, there are people there, you know, generation after generation, after the first initial movement into the city from the rural areas, and the people have just stayed. And so it was a question of finding this older generation. I keep on talking about them as "old people" and "grandmothers", and then, and now, I have to shake myself to remember that a lot of them were younger than I was! Nevertheless, they were the grandmother generation.

PT: Because they were born in the 1950s, is that right?

MB: No, no, the mother generation were born in the 1950s. The grandmother generation were born roundabout 1930, most of them.

PT: Yes. I see. Okay. Oh, so you were looking for the grandmothers first?

MB: Looking for the grandmothers first, yes, and then saying, "Of these grandmothers, who has got female, who has got daughters, still in Aberdeen, " we said, "just nominally, in social classes IV and V, who still look as though they live in deprived areas", although it wasn't a very clear definition.

PT: Because you could safely assume that if they'd left Aberdeen, they weren't going to be in that social class?

MB: That, and also, there might not be any transmission, you might not be able to ... you wouldn't expect any transmission between the generations, if they weren't there, you know. But if the grandmothers had been in contact with their grandchildren, that's when you might expect there would be some transmission of attitudes, beliefs, etc., and that might have an effect. I mean, there are two questions in there, aren't there. I mean, are attitudes transmitted? - (a). And (b), does it have any effect on behaviour? And (c) does that have any effect on health? There are really three questions. So we were looking at the worst case, or best case, whichever way round you like to look at it, scenario, if you see what I mean. And I found quite a large group of 50 or so, of three-generation families - there were the grandmothers who had been in Dougal Baird's study, and who had been deprived; mothers who were still in Aberdeen, in contact with the grandmothers, and still living in the poorest areas, or in unskilled jobs or whatever, and who had children of their own, so there was a third generation. And so it was a nice pattern. And that study wasn't as simple as all that, it wasn't just interviews. It was just interviews as far as the grandmother generation were concerned. I had, by this time, I had an assistant, any merit of the interviews is surely hers, she was an absolutely brilliant interviewer, and did, by far, the better interviews.

PT: What was she called?

MB: Elizabeth Paterson. Unfortunately, she didn't stay in sociology, but she should have done. It helped that she was local, and could translate! (LAUGHS)

Challenges of interviewing - gender, accents, and so on

PT: Did you ever have a problem understanding people, yourself?

MB: I did in the rural areas, not perhaps in the town, and less women than men. But some of the men in the rural areas, I really did have difficulty with.

PT: But you didn't have to interview the men, did you?

MB: Not for this study, I'm thinking of the previous study where I had difficulty with the dialect. By this time maybe I was getting used to it anyway. Anyway, for whatever reason, Elizabeth was a much better interviewer than I was, she was brilliant.

PT: And I suppose there's also the point about whether they can understand, if somebody has a very different accent to them as well.

MB: Yeah. Or there's also this thing that they may feel you are being superior, I mean, if you have an English accent, that you are being different, or superior, or putting yourself in this place of a medical person, or a service provider, or whatever, you know. I mean, yeah, obviously, you try all the tricks there are to get over that, but I'm not sure that you can always get over that.

PT: So what sort of tricks did you try, then?

MB: Oh, I know I altered my accent. I know I did my best to adopt a modified Buchan accent. Oh, I don't know, I can't really describe precisely what one did, but I think everybody who does interviewing, knows the way in which you, you try to slip into the world of the people you are interviewing, by your manner, by everything you can think of. Anyway, Mothers and Daughters was, as I say, interviews of the grandmother generation - long ones - I mean, sometimes three, four, five hours, that went on forever! They were great talkers were those ladies! (LAUGHS)

Linking attitudinal and behavioural data

With the younger generation, there were interviews, more than one interview, because, there again, we applied this principle of seeing what happens, and we followed them for a year, because we wanted to look at not just their attitudes, but the (b) and (c) of the questions I mentioned earlier - I mean, does it affect behaviour, and then does it, in fact, affect health? So we wanted to look at examples of behaviour, and of episodes in the children's health, so we followed the two to three monthly interviews for a year, trying to interview them whenever something happened, whenever they had a hospital appointment due, or something of that sort. Or if a child was ill, we'd go back a little while later to see what happened about that, and so on. So there were not only interviews, but also a more rigorous recording of the child's health over the whole period, and [whether] what the mothers said and did about this child's health, had any relation to their interview about their attitudes, and whether that had any relation to the interview about the grandmother's attitudes - we tried to connect up all these various stages. We came out with, you know, what I do think is absolutely fascinating data, particularly from the older generation, and a strong difference between the two generations, and a lot of interesting and tragic and funny stories about the young mothers and the youngest generation. But, in general, the conclusion was that attitudes were not transmitted, you see, the young women were reacting against their mothers, as much as following them. But it didn't do anything with the children's health, there are all sorts of other reasons.

PT: Which is a kind of transmission, of course, in itself, if you do the opposite.

MB: Well, right, yes. If that is what affected the children's health, yes, of course, it would have been. But it wasn't that that affected the children's health, it was all the obvious things that affected the children's health. There was heredity, which I suppose can be said to be transmitted! But it wasn't transmitted behaviour. It wasn't transmitted attitudes to health services because their attitudes were entirely different, couldn't have been more different. And what affected the children was simply circumstances in the environment and heredity, and, yes, things that happened at the child-bearing, if you call that behaviour, because it is, obviously, associated with behaviour.

PT: Yeah, in some cases it could be more voluntary, like smoking, say, couldn't it?

MB: Yeah. Yeah. But largely, I mean, that they were still, in fact, in some cases, even worse, drowned in poverty and disadvantaged as the previous generation had been.

Influence of sociology books in her career

PT: You were saying earlier, that that book, I take it as the one you mean, has shaped the rest of your life in some way, I think you said?

MB: Yes. Yes.

PT: What did you mean by that?

MB: Oh, I just mean that most of the things I've done seem to have been because I read a book, and as I think I said, I went into sociology because I read The Last Refuge, and thought, "Oh, brilliant! That's what I want to do!" (LAUGHS) And the same applies to almost everything else I've ever done! (LAUGHS)

PT: But in this case, you'd been writing rather than reading, hadn't you.

MB: Yes. Yes.

PT: And is it true that you put your children's names into the book?

MB: No, no. No, no. No, I'm sorry, that was a misunderstanding. I just meant that as a corollary to saying most of the things I've done in life have been because of some book or other, my children accused me of naming them out of books - which is true - but this is out of other books. They want to know where their names come from, they're not family names or anything like that. They say, "Why have you called me .." "Oh, because of that book". "Yes, it would be a book, wouldn't it!" (LAUGHS)

The pleasure of the work

MB: I do remember the whole period, it was one of tremendous pleasure. I got so attached to the couthie folk of the North-East of Scotland, I really did, and I remember so many of them, with, you know, such very great pleasure. It was a wonderful place to do qualitative work, I think, a community like that.

PT: What made it good?

MB: I don't know! (LAUGHS) I remember, as clearly as if it was yesterday, the first time I realised this, just sitting in a bare tenement, with Aberdeen's light streaming in through the windows, hardly able to listen to the story that the old boy was telling me, for this feeling of hugging myself surreptitiously, and saying, "What a world that has such people in it!" And "What a marvellous job to be able to do, somebody is paying me to do this job, and it's the best job in all the world!" I think there's a sort of Damascus moment there, which hits a lot of qualitative researchers, don't you think?

Using counting as part of analysis

PT: And, indeed, on that point, have you always sort of counted, you know when you have a set of interviews, even if they're a relatively small number, have you always used counting as one way of analysis?

MB: I would argue it depends entirely on the question, you know. There are some questions that you do answer by point counting, and some that don't, and I've used different methods on the same dataset. Certainly on that Mothers and Daughters stuff, I've used several different methods on that, and one of them was explicitly counting, it was a strictly discourse analysis method of counting, mentions of words, and mentions of diseases, and mentions of causes, and attachment of causes to diseases, and that was all counting, you know. But it's still qualitative, I think, because it's in a qualitative paradigm. You're not doing statistical tests on it, but you're demonstrating linkages and weights by counting, you know. Anyway, I've nothing against quantitative sociology, or the scientific (quotes) method, in general. I mean, I lived for very many years, very happily, with a distinguished scientist, and we got on perfectly well! (LAUGHS)

Quality of current medical sociology research

My only slight carp about, especially about qualitative medical sociology, is that it's becoming a bit routinised, and a bit trivialised. This is partly, I think, through general editing. I mean, if I get one more paper which says, "I looked at these twelve patients by the principles of grounded theory, and here are some excerpts from these interviews", and "Aren't these excerpts interesting", and "Look, they think like this" and, "Bingo, that's the end of my paper", I shall scream, you know! It should be more rigorous than that. Qualitative research, to my mind, has been adopted so enthusiastically by health service research, as opposed to sociology, but it is being taught in a fairly trivialised way, that I do ask myself what the difference is between qualitative research, and a bit of journalism? I mean, sometimes it isn't even interesting enough to be called journalism - sub-journalism! (LAUGHS) I mean, in what sense is this science?

PT: Is this in terms of people presenting quotations and then not analysing them?

MB: I suppose it is analysis, you know. You see, I don't think it's enough, simply to interview a lot of people, to maybe do some coding on their answers, in other words, take it to bits a bit, and then put it together again in the way in which you think it's answered your questions, and say, "Well, they thought like this", "They thought like this", "They thought like this", and that's grounded theory, which it isn't. That's not enough to me, that's, as I said, that's sub-journalism.

PT: So what do you want to add, then?

MB: I want to add rigour. I want to add ... (LAUGHS) I argue with anybody, anybody who teaches that qualitative method doesn't have research questions. I insist you can't start unless you're asking questions, and if you haven't got questions, how on earth do you know what data are relevant? I mean, what people had for breakfast is relevant if you haven't got a question in mind! You've got to have something to restrict the universe of interest to something less than the whole universe. And that you've got to prove, as well as you can, your answers to those questions. Just producing a few things that people have said, is not proving anything. So I feel a lot of the rigour is going out of the bread and butter qualitative research in medical sociology, or, rather, in health services research, which is some sort of twin of medical sociology. And it stresses me, I'd like to see it come back. I think a lot of rubbish is published. Well, I'm as responsible as for that as anybody else, I suppose. That it's interesting is not enough to make it sociology. If it's interesting, it could be something else. It could be literature, or it could be a biography, or it could be anthropology, even. It could be history, it could be all sorts of things. But it's not necessarily sociology, just because it's interesting! Sociology is trying to find out how things work, and why things happen, and there must be a "why" in there somewhere - a "why" or a "how" - and if you take the "why" and the "how" out, it's no longer sociology. But that is simply my curmudgeonly bad-tempered (LAUGHS) opinionated view, after I've read too many poor submissions to a journal, which call themselves sociology! (LAUGHS)

Gender and career flexibility

I'm just conscious of having been so outstandingly lucky, all the way along. It's totally non-PC to say this, but to some extent, women are luckier than men, because they can have jagged, more multiple careers. In the first place, they're expected to do at least three things at once, so they can! But apart from that, they can have a career before marriage, a career after, it's quite a normal thing for women to do. They don't have to go in straight lines. Of course not, I'm stereotyping, not all men go in straight lines, but on the whole, men are expected to go in straight lines, and women are not. And it means that they never reach the tops of the particular trees quite so easily, because the closest way is a straight line. So you know, you don't get enough women in top positions and so on, because they've had too many times out of their careers, and too many changes of direction and so on. Nevertheless, it's a great advantage to have that capacity to have more than one career, to have two careers at once, you know, stop one thing and start another. And it's much easier to do it as a woman, I think. So I think that's, I think one's lucky in that respect. I've been so enormously lucky to do whatever I like whenever, you know, the whole time. And the last ... I mean, I ought to have retired, maybe 20 years ago, and I'm extremely lucky - and this is nothing to do with being female, this is more like most academics - I'm extremely lucky that nobody's told me to go away and knit, you know! That I'm still ... I don't hold any sort of administrative, proper position any more, but I've got all the resources I want, and the University of East Anglia is perfectly happy to let me stay there. So how lucky can you get, you know! (LAUGHS) What do people do if, at sixty or something, they're told, "Go away, your life is over", you know! Well, yes, it's just ... what do people do if they're left on their own, and they haven't, you know, got a ... It depends upon life's circumstances, but if you haven't got anything else to get up for in the morning, then what do you do? And the UEA has been good enough to let me stay there. So how lucky can you be?