Rescheduled: 'Inequalities: Social connections in early adulthood and class formation' Prof Jane Gray:15th June

Gray inequalities presentation for FLaG

FLaG Workshop. All welcome.

This workshop presents some ongoing work linking retrospective social network schedules and panel survey data to narrative life stories in the Life Histories and Social Change database (LHSC).  LHSC includes 98 life story interviews conducted between 2005 and 2008 with three cohorts of Irish people (born before 1935, 1945-54, and 1965-74).  Ninety-five of those participants completed a network schedule at the time of interview.  All participants had previously participated in a panel survey that concluded in 2002.  The work aims to develop a formal analysis of the changing significance of social connections in early adulthood for social reproduction and social mobility, in order to understand long-term processes of social class formation in 20^th century Ireland.  I describe how I have used data from the social network schedules, and the panel survey, to situate life story cases for thematic process-tracing, and to identify the mechanisms through which social connections contributed to lifetime patterns of social mobility.  In the workshop, I will present some preliminary findings and we will discuss some of the known limitations and potential strengths of the approach.  These include issues surrounding how connections are remembered, difficulties matching connections in the formal schedules to references in the narratives and non-correspondence between accounts of significant social connections across the different data forms.

You can learn more about the Life Histories and Social Change collection on the Digital Repository of Ireland here: https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/9593xp97w.