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  • Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: ‘Scientifically, about as valuable as a chimpanzee’s tea party at the zoo’?
  • Annebella Pollen (bio)

Since its earliest days, the validity of Mass Observation (MO) as a research resource has been widely debated and this applies no less to recent Mass Observation Project-generated material, as will be discussed below.1 MO was established in 1937 by three upper-class and left-leaning young men (schoolboy ornithologist turned amateur anthropologist, Tom Harrisson; journalist and poet Charles Madge; and painter, writer and documentary-film maker Humphrey Jennings), with the aim of providing ‘an anthropology of ourselves’.2 Grounded in the argument that the press and government repeatedly made claims on behalf of the ‘man in the street’ but never tried to access his views, and frustrated with the ‘timid, bookish and unproductive’ attempts by the burgeoning academic disciplines of anthropology and sociology to undertake this work, MO tried to establish more imaginative and active means of documenting patterns of popular experience. They hoped to generate material evidence by and of ‘the mass’ that would provide access to the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of the ‘ordinary’ person on a strikingly diverse range of topics, large and small. They used a ‘shoestring methodology’,3 drawn from (and sometimes working in opposition to) popular understandings of anthropology, psychoanalysis, surrealism and social surveys, and gathered their diverse data from diaries and through ‘overheards’, via participant observation, directives (questionnaires) and day-surveys. The wide range of accounts which ensued covered political opinion and attitudes to race, sex and class as well as records of dreams, meals, mantelpieces and dancing – to name but a few of the project’s sprawling interests. The eclectic formats in which this data was made manifest include photographs, drawings, poetry and prose, printed ephemera, lists, questionnaire responses and first-hand accounts by both paid and volunteer, trained and untrained, observers.4 This eclecticism, combined with MO’s enormous scale (encompassing thousands of contributors since 1937, resulting in thousands of archival boxes of submissions that each may run to tens of thousands of words), with the sterling work of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) since its creation [End Page 213] in the 1970s, and with the establishment of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) in the 1980s, has helped to ensure MO’s current celebrated status as a unique, extraordinarily rich and internationally significant body of material for the study of everyday life.

Susan Pennybacker has noted in the pages of History Workshop Journal that the debate about MO for historians now concerns ‘how rather than whether to use it’.5 It is true that, for the purposes of analysis and interpretation, how MO might best be used is not always clear, particularly given the mixed, experimental and interdisciplinary nature of its research methods. It therefore provides a useful case study for historical methodology, offering a distinctive opportunity to reflect on the interpretation of unconventional sources through multi-disciplinary methods from across the arts and social sciences. Although MO has no direct comparative parallels, its particular contingencies – from the subjective and impressionistic character of its contributions to their diverse and eclectic form – may well be applied to other idiosyncratic historical materials that prove slippery to handle or are unwieldy in size. Consequently, a critical evaluation of interpretive strategies used to organize and understand MO may also offer research models that can look beyond a single, if vast, archive.

Methodological issues in the revival of MO since 1981 are the focus of this paper. Nevertheless, related discussions about the ‘first phase’ (1937– 50s) deserve consideration, for some of the concerns overlap. Indeed, ‘early criticisms remain in the folk memory’, as Dorothy Sheridan, Brian Street and David Bloome observed in Writing Ourselves (2000), their important account of Mass Observation. ‘When we have given seminars on the contemporary project and our research on it’, they state, ‘we invariably receive comments that cite – however vaguely – the existence of these early commentaries and raise in particular the problem of informants / observers, “representativeness”, professional / amateur, and methodology.’6

Among the objections to MO’s original research methods, the accusation that it was poor social science was particularly prevalent. In the year...

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