This week, Alex presenting findings from the project at the Institute for Historical Research Life-Cycles seminar in London. Here’s the abstract from his paper:

This paper draws on longitudinal qualitative data from the Mass Observation Project to arguethat ageing produces increasingly ambivalent relationships with the NHS in contemporary Britain. Following contributors from 1981 to the present, this paper explores how repeatedencounters with the health service reshape political understandings and expectations of public provision over the life course. Observers frequently begin by expressing principled support forthe NHS in a key that echoes the ‘welfare nationalism’ described by Andrew Seaton. However, these commitments coexist with vivid, accumulated ‘horror stories’ about their own, and theirfamily’s, experiences of NHS care. Rather than undermining affection for the NHS, though,these accumulated encounters generate nostalgic narratives of a dying public service, centring onmemories of ‘matron’, the tough but fair head of the nursing staff in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Ageing heightens these tensions, cultivating an enduring desire for a public service thatis, at once, leaner and more caring. More broadly, this paper demonstrates the distinctive value of the Mass Observation Project for tracing the transformation of political understandings overtime and the intimacy of everyday encounters with the British state.

We are very grateful to the seminar convenors for the invitation to speak, and to the audience for their engaging questions and valuable feedback.

In September, Nick Clakre led a session on ‘Longitudinal Studies’ as part of a workshop focused on Mass Observation and the ethics of re-using archival material. Nick’s talk raised a number of ethical questions about longitudinal research such as: how researchers can do justice to the complexity of individual lives while still producing clear answers to research questions; balance participants’ own voices with researchers’ interpretation and description; and decide whether to seek greater completeness and respondent validation or make more cautious claims from necessarily partial evidence. The talk also highlighted ethical dilemmas around researchers’ duty of care towards potentially vulnerable correspondents, the use of material where consent may not have been fully informed, and the tension between providing the biographical detail that makes longitudinal research valuable and protecting participants’ anonymity and confidentiality.

Many thanks to Tracey Loughran, Jessica Scantlebury and Kirsty Pattrick for organising such an thought provoking event.

In June, we presented a paper at the Modern British Studies Conference in Birmingham that examined how individuals interpreted and gave meaning to crises over the life course. Focusing on cohort effects, the paper engaged with theories of political socialisation, which emphasise the durability of early‑life values. It showed how moral frameworks formed in childhood—particularly around thrift, restraint, and self‑reliance—continued to shape how people understood contemporary political and economic events.

We looked at responses to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Many older respondents were sceptical of the language of “crisis” and “austerity”, often comparing it unfavourably with the more severe hardships they had experienced in their youth. Rather than viewing the crisis primarily as a structural failure, they tended to interpret it through a moral lens, drawing on long‑standing beliefs about discipline, responsibility, and deferred gratification.

We highlighted how one panellist’s working‑class upbringing, marked by austerity and strong moral expectations, informed her later support for spending cuts and Conservative economic policies. Her interpretation of the financial crisis centred on individual irresponsibility and a perceived decline in social values, rather than systemic economic factors.

We argued that a life‑course approach helped explain the persistence of right‑leaning political attitudes among older voters. By tracing how early socialisation produced enduring moral interpretations that were repeatedly reapplied in new contexts, it showed why policies such as austerity could resonate, even when the language used to describe contemporary hardship was rejected.

In April, we presented some initial findings from the project at the PSA annual conference in Oxford for a panel on the Politics of Age. We explore why some people become more right‑leaning as they age, and what a longitudinal lifecourse perspective can add to existing explanations of older people’s voting behaviour. Much research points to ageing effects, highlighting psychological change, stable values, and life‑cycle transitions such as work, family formation, and retirement. In Britain, Jane Green and Raluca L. Pahontu (2024) argue older voters’ greater wealth and lower debt levels gave them more economic security and self-insurance, which reduced risk aversion and helped explain their support for Brexit and in 2016. Older voters with wealth supported leave because they did not expect Brexit would impact their personal finances. The study highlights the importance of examining causal effects at the individual level, which is something we think we can add to with our study. Our paper argues for closer attention to individual‑level processes over time. Using a longitudinal lifecourse approach, we show how political change may reflect not only the accumulation of assets and security, but also the accumulation of stories, disappointments, and grievances. We illustrated this by tracing the political biography of one panellist who moves to the right as he grows older.

We’re pleased to share that our first project paper has now been published in British Politics.

The current political moment in Britain is characterised by disaffection, affective polarisation, and populist mobilisation of these (dis)affections. How best to research these moody times? We argue that political studies could utilise Mass Observation (MO) more than it has done. An independent research organisation, MO has collected observations, diaries, and responses to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions and tasks – from across the UK during two periods: 1937 to 1949, and 1981 to the present. These collections have been described as a ‘rare resource’ (Dalton 2020: 964) of ‘exceptional quality’ (Hay 2024: 482). We introduce MO, review existing uses of MO by scholars of British politics, locate MO in political studies’ methodological division of labour, and provide a guide for new users of the archive. We argue that MO provides distinctive access to public opinion, feeling, and behaviour in biographical context, historical context, and the context of everyday life.

You can read the full article at the link below:

Read the publication here →

In February, Nick Clarke joined Ben Ansell on BBC Rethink to discuss one of the most puzzling political questions of our time: authenticity.
You can listen to the episode here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qthx

And here’s the programme description: As generative AI and Deepfake technology has progressed over the last decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s never been more difficult to try to work out what is authentic and what is fake.

The search for authenticity is not new. It’s a task that’s challenged humanity for hundreds of years. Forgers have always tried to pass off copies as great artworks, but it’s not always clear when an artist was responsible for an entire painting or farmed out parts of the job to apprentices. A few well-known modern artists outsource all of the construction and manufacture of some of their works to skilled craftsmen and women.

Although the idea is theirs, does that make the final product somehow less than the genuine article?

Idiosyncrasies, perceived flaws or personal flourishes are often key indicators that show an image is authentic. We use those same tell-tale signs to judge the authenticity of another type of image: the one that politicians want to portray.

How important is it to be a politician who is seen as authentic by voters? How can we measure political authenticity? If someone is carefully crafting their image on social media, how real is it? And even if it is fake, do voters care, if they have been seduced by the illusion?

In November, Jonathan Moss and Alex Hill presented papers in Montreal at the North American Conference on British Studies. Jonathan took part in a panel examining methodologies for understanding aging in modern Britain, with particular attention to the opportunities and challenges of qualitative longitudinal approaches, including oral history, biographical, and life-course methods. The panel highlighted how personal testimony can illuminate the intersections of social, political, and personal change across the life course. Jonathan’s paper explored the challenges and possibilities of using Mass Observation longitudinally, presenting some early findings from our project.

Alex participated in a separate panel on Visions of the Future in Modern Britain. His paper examined how “ordinary” people made sense of the future between 1940 and 1979, drawing on a wide range of sources including Mass Observation. Here’s the abstract for his paper:

In this paper, I explore how ‘ordinary’ people made sense of the future between 1940 and 1979. I draw on a wide range of sources—Mass-Observation directive responses, transcripts from social science research and radio interviews, and children’s essays—to uncover the vernacular discourses with which people could orient themselves towards change. I argue that many people considered their own personal futures to be projects, determined by their own choices. However, they found it increasingly difficult to project a collective future across this period.

I argue that two narratives of a collective future dominated vernacular politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The first was a populist vision of the future, one that premised its hopes on the political awakening of ‘the people’. This narrative flourished in the political culture of wartime Britain but proved difficult to sustain in the austere politics of the immediate post-war years. The second was a meritocratic and technocratic vision of the future. Here, hope was premised on those with ‘brains’—they were the ones who could plan and manage the future. This narrative continued to flourish into the 1950s. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, hopeful visions of a collective future were in  crisis. Across a range of sources from the period, ‘ordinary’ people can be found expressing profound doubts about ‘progress’. I end the paper by reflecting on where these doubts might have come from, and their broader significance for British politics in the final third of the twentieth century

Following a public engagement workshop in June hosted by the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House which looked at how Mass Observation could be used to develop a better understanding of political engagement, Jonathan Moss and Emily Robinson have had a policy paper published by the network, History and Policy entitled ‘Mass Observation and Political Engagement in Britain’.

Following a record-low turnout at the 2024 general election, declining levels of political trust and efficacy, and calls from the British Polling Council for greater methodological pluralism and the use of more mixed-methods approaches to better understand Britain’s political culture, Moss and Robinson explore how political studies might develop new methods for understanding engagement.

Arguing that Mass Observation (MO) offers policymakers and campaigners a deeper understanding of the moods underlying political disaffection in the UK, Moss and Robinson propose that MO should be revived – and funded – as a public resource for democratic reflection. MO offers rich, qualitative material that helps illuminate the emotional and experiential dimensions of political life, providing a deeper understanding of the present moment.

The paper draws historical parallels between today and the 1930s, when MO was first established. Its founders were concerned about voter apathy and political disengagement, seeking to develop new ways for policymakers to understand public sentiment – whilst also raising political awareness among citizens in a time of polarisation and extremism.

There are clear echoes of that context today. The paper makes the case for reviving MO as a political resource, securing its long-term future, and funding it in a similar way to the British Social Attitudes survey.

This week, Nick Clarke is presenting a paper at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference with Khaleda Brophy-Harmer on Using Mass Observation for qualitative longitudinal research. Here’s the abstract:

Since 1981, Mass Observation has run a panel of writers who respond to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions – every few months. If geographers have used this qualitative data recently, they have mostly done so by analysing a range of responses to a small number of directives on a particular topic e.g. Brexit (Clarke and Moss 2021); thrift (Ehgartner and Holmes 2022); time pressure (Holdsworth 2022); the Covid-19 pandemic (Clarke and Barnett 2023); bedrooms (Walsh 2024); drones (Jackman 2025). It is possible, however, to analyse the responses of certain panellists to multiple directives over multiple years. In this paper, we reflect on two studies using this longitudinal approach. One project on the performative production of whiteness followed a small number of panellists over time, tracking their mobile racial identities. A second project on political understandings is currently following a larger number of panellists, tracking development of understandings over the life course.