Ageing, Narrative and Identity

New Qualitative Social Research

N. Hubble, P. Tew

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780230390942
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book outlines the methodology and results of the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project, led by a research team from Brunel University, UK. It investigates how older people resist stereotypical cultural representations of ageing and demonstrates the importance of narrative understanding to social agency.

Part I

Contexts and Methodologies

1

The Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP)

The Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), which ran from 1 May 2009 until 31 January 2012, was conducted by a research team based in the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) at Brunel University. The initial FCMAP research questions were concerned with investigating (1) the relationship between cultural representations of, and social attitudes to, ageing and (2) the potential of critical reflection and elective reading by older subjects for engendering new ways of thinking about ageing. In meeting this second objective, it was necessary to develop an approach which limited the influence of the research team on the participants as much as possible in order to foster autonomous thinking processes. Therefore, the FCMAP team had reservations concerning direct interviews with volunteers in the first phase of the project as these would incorporate and represent an unequal set of relationships. Instead, following Holstein and Winkler’s (2007) advice ‘to worry less about large-scale generalisations and more about getting the story right’ (22), FCMAP set out to assemble an innovative methodological bricolage by refusing to rule out any information in advance and drawing equally on personal narratives, critical reflections on group encounters, responses to fiction and the fictions themselves, with the aim of revealing experiences of, and opinions concerning, ageing that normally remain hidden from public view.

Narrative and fiction seemed particularly germane because of the potential in their synthesis of archetypal, social, quotidian and personal worlds, and their correlation to (if not permeation of) the world of eventfulness and action equally. Jens Brockmeier (2009) stresses the importance and potential of: ‘The creative potential of meaning making as it manifests itself in both the physical and narrative imagination [ ... ]’ (214). Significantly he also emphasizes that people are capable of synthesizing multiple scenarios, both fictive and experiential lived ones (214).

Usually we do not have any difficulty acting in such multiple scenarios. Shifting between them with great ease and agility, we are often not even aware of this multiplicity. However, things turn out to be thornier when we try to understand what’s going on here; when we want to investigate the ways human beings construct their lives in real and possible worlds. And this is even more the case when we want to make psychological and philosophical sense of this extended space of possibilities we live in. (214–215)

Importantly Brockmeier notes ‘the interplay of multiple meaning constructions’ (215) and the fact that the ‘narrative imagination is pivotal in probing and extending real and fictive scenarios of human agency’ (215). With these contexts in mind, FCMAP drew on the tradition of the social research organization Mass Observation (MO), which used techniques from poetry and surrealism to compile an ‘anthropology of ourselves’.

MO was founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge and ran in its first phase until 1949 – for an overview see Crain (2006). Their projects included a study of the industrial working class in Bolton (‘Worktown’) and the establishment of a national panel of volunteers, who answered monthly questionnaires about various aspects of their everyday lives and were, from the outbreak of the War, asked to keep day-to-day personal diaries; the most famous of these was that of Nella Last (1981), memorably portrayed by Victoria Wood in the 2006 TV drama Housewife 49. MO was unique in terms of its participative research techniques, capacity to simultaneously reveal and interrogate narratives of everyday life modes of data collection and pioneering analysis of public opinion (see Hubble 2010). In 1939, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge wrote in Britain by Mass-Observation (1939):

Opinion is made in two ways. It is made by each single person looking at the facts, as far as they are available, and then framing his own judgment on them. It is also made by the reaction of each single person to the opinions of other people. Few are so confident of their own judgment (whatever they may say) as to be uninfluenced by knowing what other people are thinking. It is here that the newspapers play an important role. For the newspapers not only state their version of the facts – they also state their version of the public opinion of the moment. (32)

In this context, the personal view may be elusive, as Tom Harrisson details in ‘What Is Public Opinion’, objecting to ‘crude stratification’ (368) and reminding us that genuine public opinion represents huge numbers of people:

each one with a private opinion, with private prides and prejudices, personal antagonisms and loyalties. This is the stuff of Britain, tough, solid, stolid stuff – the rhythm essentially slow. When we talk about public opinion, we should mean the top level in this great conglomeration of private opinions. There is not, anywhere, a separate entity called public opinion. Public opinion only comes from the minds and the tongues of the people. But there is an important distinction between the two areas of existence – the area of the minds and the area of the tongues. In the mind is the private thought; and on the tongue, the public statement. Logically, a person’s ‘real opinion’ is the opinion he holds privately. He will not necessarily voice publicly, as public opinion, certain parts of his private opinion, which is a complex of feelings, often conflicting. (369)

Harrisson adds ‘Public opinion is only a part of private opinion and only that part which, so to speak, dare show itself at any moment’ (373). Diaries of course have the potential (as implicitly suggested by Harrisson) to unlock something of the very privately held opinions that other methods of engagement tend not to access and MO’s central method might be seen as encouraging members of the public to keep a variety of diaries ranging from the day diaries they collected for the twelfth day of each month during 1937 to the vast diaries kept by observers, including Nella Last and the novelist Naomi Mitchison, during the Second World War. In Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (2010), James Hinton notes the unique specificity of these diaries: ‘Mass-Observation offered a discipline and a context which transcended the purely private, meeting a need to frame individual quests in relation to larger public purposes’ (6). Therefore, he argues that they ‘take us as close as a historian can hope to get to observe selfhood under construction’ (7). And clearly a sufficient number of such diaries taken together can also offer some view of the manner in which social opinions either emerge or are responded to, as well as providing, through analysis, an informal cartography of aspects of collective group identities. Crucially, Hinton refuses to give ground to those critics who question MO on grounds of how representative it is, by stating explicitly that the biographical examples he discusses open a window on to the personal opinion and everyday life of postwar Britain and are definitely ‘not “case studies” narrowly designed to sustain a particular theory or test a particular hypothesis’ (20). This was also how the original mass observers understood their project; their analysis involved sifting and accounting for the influence of imposed cultural views upon personal perspectives, thereby allowing them to reveal private opinion at odds with publicly accepted norms as, for example, in their prediction of the 1945 Labour election victory 18 months in advance (Harrisson 1944). Moreover, in today’s ‘politically correct’ age, when people may be even more wary of candid public utterances, diaries retain this potential to unlock private views and reveal their interaction with wider social and cultural narratives.

Since 1981, a contemporary MO Project (MOP) has been run from the MO Archive (MOA) at the University of Sussex. This is one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world. Three times a year, MO participants receive a seasonal ‘directive’, which is a set of open questions that invite them to write freely and discursively about their views and experiences. Anne Jamieson and Christina Victor’s edited collection, Researching Ageing and Later Life: The Practice of Social Gerontology (2002), includes an article on the MOP by Dorothy Sheridan, which enumerates the particular attributes that make it particularly suitable for ageing research. First, the majority of respondents are not only over 50 but also well-distributed across the older age ranges. Second, the longitudinal nature of the MOP means that, for example, at the turn of the millennium they had 18 respondents in the over-80 age range who had been writing for over 15 years, providing a vast wealth of material. The same holds true across all the age ranges, as Sheridan observes:

The project itself is a record of the ageing process over 20 years, whether someone goes from 32 to 52, or from 62 to 82, and if ageing is taken to mean the process of growing older at any point in one’s life, then we have access here to a huge amount of information about the life span. (75)

Third, the particular quality of MO, as opposed to other forms of life writing such as memoirs and autobiographies, is that it does not provide one single monolithic account of a life. Rather, reading across the directive replies of an individual over the years reveals layered life stories made up of description and re-description, which ‘enable us to have access to the contradictions of everyday life, and to the changes of people’s perceptions of themselves and the world they inhabit’ (75). MO material has been used successfully in ageing research ranging from Pat Thane’s Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000) to Bill Bytheway’s work on ageing and birthdays (2005, 2009, 2011).

For these two reasons, that is its capacity to reveal private opinion and its pedigree in ageing research, FCMAP made MO diary-keeping techniques central to the two major studies it set up, following Chris Phillipson’s (2007: vii) proposals for a critical gerontology, both to give voice directly to older subjects and to include them centrally in the research process: one involving the present-day MO and the other 90 volunteers from the older age ranges organized into reading and discussion groups. For the first of these, an MO directive was commissioned by the FCMAP team, and issued in Winter 2009, concerning participants’ responses to representations of ageing in political and media discourse. The directive was sent to the panel of around 600 people and 193 written responses were returned. In conjunction with earlier directives concerning ageing in Winter 1992, whose responses are featured in Thane (2000), and Autumn 2006, it was possible to collate high-quality longitudinal qualitative data regarding how ageing is understood in society, how this differs between generations and how social expectations regarding ageing relate to self-understanding. Findings from this study are discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this volume, and the three directives are reproduced in the appendix.

For the other parallel strand of research conducted by FCMAP, eight volunteer reading groups (VRGs) were set up in collaboration with the Third Age Trust, involving 80 volunteers who were in an age range from their early 60s to their 90s. The volunteers were arranged into reading groups located in the following district associations of the University of the Third Age (U3A): Banstead (which was given the code CBL), Camden Town (OUL), Highgate/North London 1 (NOL), Highgate/North London 2 (HIL), Kingston (KSL), South East London (SEL), Tower Hamlets (THL) and Waterloo (WMC). Over the period of a year (2009–2010), all groups read nine nominated novels published from 1944 to the present, a period that corresponded largely with the adult life experiences of participants, and met once a month to discuss each book and the various ageing-related issues arising. The novels were (in order of reading) David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence (2008), Jim Crace’s Arcadia (1992), Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003), Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002), Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me (2004), Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (1977), Norah Hoult’s There Were No Windows (1944) and Fay Weldon’s Chalcot Crescent (2009). Groups were allowed to substitute one book from this list with another from a ‘B’ list: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), Angus Wilson’s Late Call (1964), Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremount (1971), Margaret Forster’s The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury (1974), Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up? (1994), Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (2006) and Anita Brookner’s Strangers (2009). These novels, many of which are described and discussed in Chapter 5 of this book, were chosen to provide a range of contrasting vantage points on later life, and also for the thought-provoking ways in which their presentation might engage and mobilize the readers’ attitudes and assumptions. Reading-group members – using a personally allocated code relating to the reading group in which they participated to ensure anonymity – kept diaries recording their responses to each book during and after reading it, and again after the group discussion of the book. In doing the latter most respondents opted generally to reflect upon the other readers’ views and the themes arising from such discussions. Findings from this study are discussed in Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 of this book.

A number of authors of the books on the reading list discussed their novels and the topic of ageing, as well as answering questions, in a series of (recorded) interviews and public events organized by the project team, to which the reading-group members were invited. An audience of over 220 came to Brunel on 3 February 2010 to see Jim Crace and David Lodge in discussion; about 150 came to hear Caryl Phillips in Central London on 19 March 2010; over 70 attended the Trezza Azzopardi daytime talk at Brunel on 10 June 2010; and finally about 250 listened to Fay Weldon discuss ageing with Will Self at Brunel on 8 April 2011 (see Self 2011).

From the beginning of the project, in order to make the insights revealed directly available to policy makers, the FCMAP team collaborated with researchers from the think tank Demos (who had offered advice on developing the structure of the project before its commencement) and supplied them with regular analytical reports on the material coming in from both the U3A reading groups and the longitudinal study of the MO data. This process culminated in the intense collaborative drafting of a 200-page report Coming of Age, published as a paperback in April 2011 and simultaneously made available online in PDF format (as of December 2012, the download rate was just over 6,000). Coming of Age was launched at the FCMAP ‘New Cultures of Ageing Conference’, held at Brunel University on the 8–9 April 2011 (see below), during which panels of speakers including Professor Pat Thane, Professor Dorothy Sheridan (MO), Keith Richards (U3A), Louise Bazalgette (Demos) and members of the FCMAP team presented and discussed topics such as third and fourth age subjectivity and ageing policy. The day culminated with the aforementioned public debate between Will Self and Fay Weldon.

Subsequently, the FCMAP team and Demos researchers presented the report findings to national, regional, local government and third sector stakeholders at the ‘Coming of Age Policy Roundtable’ hosted by Demos at their headquarters in Tooley Street, London, on 16 May. Speaking alongside the presenters, Hugh Pullinger, Head of Pensions, Ageing Strategy and Analysis Division at the Department for Work and Pensions, welcomed the FCMAP research. Three key stakeholders then responded to the report under Chatham House rules, all engaging with the implications of the research and all praising its innovative nature. As one said, ‘It’s a really fantastic, very detailed report. I thought there were several particularly useful aspects of this research. I found the use of narratives as a research method particularly helpful, in providing a rich, bottom-up take on issues that are often dealt with in a very top-down way.’

Therefore, it can be seen that this large-scale funded project was able to explore such questions as whether older people in Britain suffered from outdated perceptions, assumptions and treatment in terms of their ageing process and its perception and categorization by others, particularly in the public arena and in terms of social policy, much of this informing Coming of Age, co-authored by Tew and Hubble with the third FCMAP researcher, Jago Morrison, and two researchers from Demos, Louise Bazalgette and John Holden. However, it also allowed a wider investigation of areas of human behaviour and certain modes of their sociological analysis focusing on the relation of the individual to cultural knowledge and trends, and the role of notions of identity and agency in everyday life. It is very largely this wider investigation that informs the discussions in this volume. One key concept that became increasingly important was that of narrative identity, which is described broadly by McAdams, Josselon and Lieblich (2006) as follows: ‘We use the term narrative identity to refer to the stories people construct and tell about themselves to define who they are for themselves and for others’ (4). As Michel Butor (1969) observes, narrative is ‘one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality’ (26), without which as humans we cannot fully or satisfactorily function. If narrative underlies much of our social existence as an underlying informing and structuring principle, then it can be used actively as variously a mode of research method, inquiry and response. As McAdams, Josselon and Lieblich add, ‘Narrative inquiry rests on the assumption of the storied nature of human experience’ (4).

In situating itself across the apparent boundaries of both humanities and social science, the FCMAP research conjoins and interrelates two associated modes of expression that are found in the everyday lives of individuals, the first the ub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Contexts and Methodologies
• Part II  Mass Observation and Ageing
• Part III  Readers, Writers and Ageing
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Extracts from the Relevant Mass Observation Directives
• Bibliography
• Index