B3102 - Birth Cohorts and the Biosocial ethnographic interventions on the life course - 29/05/2018

B number: 
B3102
Principal applicant name: 
Sahra Gibbon | Anthropology Department UCL
Co-applicants: 
Title of project: 
Birth Cohorts and the Biosocial: ethnographic interventions on the 'life course'
Proposal summary: 

Studies that follow individuals across time, taking a ‘life course’ approach, are important for understanding how biological and social experiences interact to shape health. However while biological, epidemiological and quantitative social science approaches are often used, incorporating lived social realities into a ‘life course approach’ remains a neglected, yet vital resource for increasing knowledge about how health is shaped by biosocial processes. This 12 month pilot study will work with two high profile regional birth cohort studies in the UK and Brazil (ALSPAC and the Pelotas Birth Cohort) to explore how one in-depth method, ethnography, can be used to provide a richer understanding of social realities in life course approaches. It will focus on how ethnography can be used to examine a particular period in the life course, ‘motherhood’ and experiences of social adversity among birth cohort participants. Contributing innovatively to the development of a ‘mixed method’ approach the pilot study will be a first step in making ethnography an essential tool in biosocial life course research by widening a discussion between disciplines about how understanding lived social realities and experiences can be more productively linked to biology or epidemiology.

Impact of research: 
Outputs from the pilot study will include (a) free to download report from the final workshop including best practice suggestions for increasing the use of ethnography in longitudinal cohort studies (b) an article in Social Science and Medicine presenting the findings and discussing the theoretical/methodological opportunities in using ethnography in longitudinal birth cohort studies and developing ‘mixed methods’ approaches. The pilot study will lay the foundation for a larger comparative and cross disciplinary research initiative to further explore how the tool of ethnography can better integrated into life course approaches. The PI currently works with others developing ethnographic expertise with and/or about birth cohorts. This includes Liz Roberts (University of Michigan) who is combining ethnography with a birth cohort methodology; a planned workshop at the Brocher Foundation 2019 and a panel at the American Anthropological Association in 2018 on birth cohorts as a ‘technology’ of biosocial research. As the programme director of the MSc Biosocial Medical Anthropology, starting at UCL in 2018, and a board member of the ESRC ‘Socio-B’ DTC at UCL the PI is ideally placed to develop this project and a vision for more fully incorporating ethnographic research as part of a biosocial approach to the life course and longitudinal cohort studies. Students from both these programmes will be encouraged (as part of their dissertation and project work) to participate in data analysis and planned future research.
Date proposal received: 
Tuesday, 24 April, 2018
Date proposal approved: 
Wednesday, 25 April, 2018
Keywords: 
Anthropology, Qualitative study, Cohort studies - attrition, bias, participant engagement, ethics