B3492 - Discovering the person behind the data Assembling and validating vulnerable childrens life histories from quantitative data - 27/04/2020

B number: 
B3492
Principal applicant name: 
Elaine Sharland | University of Sussex, UK (United Kingdom)
Co-applicants: 
Dr Paula Holland
Title of project: 
Discovering the person behind the data: Assembling and validating vulnerable children's life histories from quantitative data
Proposal summary: 

This proof of concept proposal (to ESRC Research Methods Development https://esrc.ukri.org/funding/funding-opportunities/esrc-rmdg-2020/), aims to test the validity of an innovative research approach bringing narrative/life history methods to quantitative longitudinal data, to deepen their explanatory power. Drawing on Singer et al (1998), the investigators have to date developed the method to yield insights (missing from aggregate analyses) into the impact of illness on women’s employment trajectories (Holland, 2006), and counterintuitive aggregate findings that children and families receiving social work fare worse over time than similar others (Sharland et al, 2017).The validity of the approach now needs testing. If successful, it may be applied to multiple research questions and cohort/panel datasets, releasing narrative potential to discover the people behind the data and to explain complexity and change, especially in the absence of complementary qualitative longitudinal data.

Substantive focus will be on children with significant health-related difficulties as teenagers, exploring how these vulnerabilities are affected and affect their lives over time. A small sample of longstanding ALSPAC child, and unrelated parent, participants will be invited to: i) allow the research team to craft the child and family’s life history from multiple variables collected directly from and/or administratively linked to the respondent over time; ii) participate in research interviews exploring the fit between their own and ‘research-assembled’ life story accounts; iii) permit analysis of this fit to be informed by further ALSPAC data mapped to their self-reports. Care will be taken to ensure informed consent and confidentiality throughout. If the inter-story compatibility is sufficiently strong, a scaled-up bid to a further ESRC call will follow.

Impact of research: 
This is a small-scale proof of concept project. If successful, it will provide the foundation for a scaled-up bid to a planned further ESRC Research Methods Development call. The project already has the interest and support of stakeholders within the child wellbeing and welfare sectors (representatives of the National Children’s Bureau, Research in Practice and the Children’s Commissioner’s Office will, for example, be invited to join the project Advisory Group). There are also synergies between this work and PI Sharland’s current collaboration with the Rees Centre, University of Oxford (leading) and other colleagues, on a strategic research bid to the Nuffield Foundation on improving Data for Children. If successful, this project will contribute to the wider research and policy agenda to maximise the use and linkage of existing data about, from and with children. More broadly, if validity can be sufficiently well demonstrated, this method has potential for much wider use with multiple datasets, allowing social and health scientists to maximise the value of existing longitudinal data to interrogate and shed light on multiple research questions.
Date proposal received: 
Monday, 30 March, 2020
Date proposal approved: 
Tuesday, 31 March, 2020
Keywords: 
Social Science, Cancer, Childhood - childcare, childhood adversity