Lynn Jamieson

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR)

This is an open-access publication at https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12556 It is an editorial for a special journal issue.

After the enfranchisement of 16- and 17-year olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, much research continued to prioritise questions of how education influences young people's political engagement. By contrast, this paper advances an original focus on educational outcomes of youth political participation and investigates how political en...

This research note builds on a previously published discussion of the ‘breadth-and-depth’ method for working with extensive amounts of secondary qualitative data, to consider the way that theory can be used and developed as part of this method. We illustrate potential deductive, inductive, and abductive logics of the relationship between theory and...

An important part of care home life is the support given to older residents by their families/friends through regular visiting. Social visits to residents by their families ceased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and residents were confined to their rooms. This paper reports on how care home staff improvised to address this situation during the...

Aims and objectives This paper explores children’s experiences and perceptions of their own bilingualism in two contexts in Scotland, UK: a primary school with a high proportion of children using a language other than English at home; and a primary school where the language of instruction is an indigenous, minority language, Gaelic. Methodology Th...

This article sets out a conceptual framework for examining future building as an emotionally reflexive practice of intimacy and gendered agency. Emotionally reflexive future building is a relational activity, subject to gendering but open to queering. We illustrate this by drawing on cases taken from three qualitative studies that deal with the fut...

Families with relatives in care homes have been separated during COVID-19: to protect lives, protect the NHS and reduce the spread of the virus. However, this has resulted in significant harm, and disproportionately affected. Restrictions at the time of writing have lasted nine months. Our research, carried out between May and October 2020, focuses...

Post#28. The blog discusses the potential of qualitative secondary analysis, and in particular ‘big qual’ analysis, for helping to overcome the restrictions placed on qualitative work during the global pandemic. In so doing, Lynn and colleagues draw on a recent ESRC National Centre for Research Methods study – Working across qualitative longitudina...

The trends of living alone and of formation and dissolution of couple relationships are not independent and their mutual influences need to be unpacked. Idealisation of couple relationships and gendered negative stereotyping of living alone persist even in countries where the trend of living alone at all ages is well developed. This is true even if...

Italy and Spain are extreme cases of low fertility linked to postponement of childbearing. Demographers continue to debate causes of postponement. This qualitative study was designed to contribute, by purposively selecting Italian and Spanish women in different socio‐economic circumstances who are partnered, childless and aged 30 to 35. Most want c...

The substantive concerns and theoretical insights of sociologies of family, intimate and personal life ought to place this body of work in closer dialogue with environmental sociology over the ‘big issue’ of climate change. However, its research active practitioners typically have a narrower repertoire of engagement with global issues and those who...

This working paper brings together the reflections of a wide range of international researchers to explore, showcase and reflect critically on the potentials and challenges of analysing large volumes of complex qualitative, and qualitative longitudinal (QLR) data, including archived material. Big Qual analysis is a new area for qualitative work and...

The focus of today’s blog is on the process of identifying qualitative material from multiple archived data sets to bring together to conduct secondary analysis. This process is the first stage in a four-step breath-and-depth method we developed for analysing large volumes of qualitative data. We draw on our experiences of conducting the ESRC Natio...

The sharing and re-use of data is encouraged by major research funding bodies in the UK as a way of maximising its value and as vital to accountability and transparency. The creation of repositories, such as the UK Data Archive which houses over 1,000 qualitative and mixed methods datasets, offers qualitative researchers and students many opportuni...

Archival storage of data sets from qualitative studies presents opportunities for combining small-scale data sets for reuse/secondary analysis. In this paper, we outline our approach to combining multiple qualitative data sets and explain why working with a corpus of ‘big qual’ data is a worthwhile endeavour. We present a new approach that iterativ...

The impact of lineage and gender on the quality of grandparent–grandchild relationships has become more complicated in recent decades. ‘In countries with high rates of couple dissolution and re-partnering, the number of a child’s potential grandparents increases as the parents of parents’ new partners or the new partners of grandparents become part...

Sociological debates on youth engagement with electoral politics play out against a backdrop of supposed 'decline' in civic participation (e.g. Putnam , Norris, ), in turn contextualized by theories of individualization in 'late' or 'reflexive' modernity (Beck, Giddens). However, the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in the 2014 Scottish Indep...

Few of the many social science researchers writing about personal life are simultaneously addressing the cluster of issues sometimes referred to by the shorthand 'environment' - sustainability, climate change, loss of biodiversity and depletion of natural resources. This article argues for much more effort in this direction, suggesting agendas for...

In the wake of the diverse mobilization for Yes in the 2014 Independence Referendum and unprecedented SNP gains in the 2015 General Election, a number of commentators deployed a rhetoric of ‘dangerous nationalism’ by way of explanation and criticism. Such an interpretation is refuted by survey evidence and complicated by sociologies of nationalism...

In the UK, more children than ever before are being brought up by parents who are engaged in some form of paid employment outside the home (Philo et al. 2008). This change has been met with interest by academics, policy-makers and indeed employers, with particular concern about how the demands of work and family are managed by parents and the impac...

In Northern Europe almost half of households consist of one person. Rates of living alone are lower in the Global South but the trend is still on the increase. Prevalent first among the elderly, living alone then becomes common at ages associated with partners and children. Fears about the end of family and community combine with stereotypes, the '...

Little is known about children's views and experiences of their parents’ work−life reconciliation and how these are negotiated in everyday family practices. This article examines families' experiences of work−life reconciliation from both children's and parents' perspectives, drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study with 14 families in Scotland....

This chapter draws on interview data with children and young people aged between 10 and 14 years, who have lived through contrasting forms of family household change, to explore what influences their ability to sustain and refashion their sense of self in the context or aftermath of loss. While children who experience the death of a parent, or pare...

As the everyday family lives of children and young people come to be increasingly defined as matters of public policy and concern, it is important to raise the question of how we can understand the contested terrain between 'normal' family troubles and troubled and troubling families. In this important, timely and thought-provoking publication, a w...

Few would disagree with Roger Silverstone that the near global exposure of almost all individuals to various forms of mass media content invisibly informs and constrains much social action and belief (Silverstone, 1994: 133). There is less agreement about the precise nature of the impact, particularly in the domain of personal life. The concern of...

We begin this chapter by looking at existing research on the relationship between living alone and individual well-being at older ages. Recognition of the importance of social embeddedness to the well-being of older people has led to a body of research which considers the role of living arrangements alongside marital and parenting histories. We con...

In our UK study, a variety of approaches were taken in exploring the relationship between sense of self and home. Information about the meaning of home would inevitably emerge from more general discussion of the experience of living alone. One direct thread of study involved exploring how open the home was to visitors, cooking for others, encouragi...

The number of people living alone is likely to continue to increase globally, both among the elderly and the working-age population, although it remains much more unthinkable and practically impossible in some regions of the world. In some parts of Europe and the United States, recession may cause pause and reversal, but, in general, where the tren...

In this chapter, we consider the role that residential history and locality play in the embeddedness of men and women living alone in relationship to people and place. Urban and rural localities provide different opportunities to enjoy resources such as housing, employment and social spaces. How do these differences modify the experience of living...

People who live alone across the ages normally associated with child rearing are not necessarily turning away from couple relationships or parenting. Some have partners, some have children and those who are childless may not be making a lifestyle choice. This chapter explores the orientation of people living alone in early to mid-adulthood to partn...

In a period of heightened awareness of global threats to orderly and predictable futures for people and planet – recession, climate change, peak oil, loss of biodiversity, terrorism – does this uncertainty impact on how young adults in their twenties think about their futures, particularly partnering and parenting? Exploratory interviews with child...

We begin by defining relationships and relational processes, before presenting children's personal relationships, and the relational processes making them personal, as of particular significance in shaping selves and social worlds. This sets the scene for the relevance of children and young people's personal relationships compared across Majority a...

'What do you want to be when you grow up?' is a question often asked of children yet little is known about how children and their parents think about their future in terms of employment. This paper, based on qualitative longitudinal research with 14 families, explores children's and parents' narratives about children's employment futures, illuminat...

'What do you want to be when you grow up?' is a question often asked of children yet little is known about how children and their parents think about their future in terms of employment. This paper, based on qualitative longitudinal research with 14 families, explores children's and parents' narratives about children's employment futures, illuminat...

This article focuses on intimacy in terms of its analytical potential for understanding social change without the one-nation blinkers sometimes referred to as 'methodological nationalism' and without Euro-North-American ethnocentrism. Extending from the concept of family practices, practices of intimacy are sketched and examples considered across c...

In this collection, over 40 researchers across the social sciences offer a series of engaging accounts reflecting on dilemmas and issues that they experienced while researching and communicating research on personal life. Their insights are food for thought for students, researchers, professionals and anyone using, planning or conducting research o...

The focus of this book is the real life experiences of conducting empirical research about families and relationships. In bringing together these reflexive accounts, our aim has been to contribute to the developing body of work on researching personal lives. In this concluding chapter we highlight the pleasures such research can engender (whilst al...

Personal life is a domain in which everybody has some degree of expertise. Social change in how people build and sustain families and relationships is highly visible in popular culture as well as systematically documented by research. The causes of changes are always the subject of popular as well as academic debate. The extent to which the latter...

Attitude survey and interview data are mobilised to address neglect of men's contribution to low fertility and wider social change in families and relationships. Men's attitudes are as relevant as women's to understanding fertility behaviour. However, fertility behaviour can only be understood in the context of a package of changes in gender relati...

Solo-living is analytically separate from 'being single' and merits separate study. In most Western countries more men are solo-living than women at ages conventionally associated with co-resident partners and children. Discussions of 'demographic transition' and change in personal life however typically place women in the vanguard, to the relative...

Popular commentators on marriage and the family often interpret the increase in heterosexual couples living together without marrying as reduced willingness to create and honour life-long partnerships. Survey and in-depth interviews with samples of 20–29 year olds living in an urban area of Scotland finds little support for the postulated link betw...

Conflicting prognoses for European identity are addressed using data from residents of Edinburgh, Scotland, on the everyday significance of being European; a theoretically informed focus on people in one city. A representative sample of established residents aged 18—24 years are compared with a sample of resident peers engaged in Europe-oriented wo...

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The continued expansion and deepening of the European Union state raises important questions about whether there will be a corresponding development of pro-supranational feeling towards Europe. This paper is based on data drawn from a European Commission (EC) funded project on the \'Orientations of Young Men and Women to Citizenship and European Id...

This chapter concentrates on solo living as a way of understanding families, relationships and households. It provides a detailed empirical analysis of who is living alone in the UK and who is moving in and out of solo living. The evidence suggests increasing levels of solo living at all stages of the lifecourse, indicative perhaps of a redrawing o...

This chapter focuses on practices of intimacy, moving the book from an analysis of families to relationships more widely. It notes that there are contradictory claims about the meaning and significance of intimacy and that there has been attention to boundaries in the conceptualisation of intimacy as well as in how it is practised. Typically, two m...

Introduction This chapter reviews how the concepts of boundaries and boundary work are deployed in theorising intimacy, in order to assess how these concepts further our understanding of intimacy and social change. In everyday current usage, intimacy is often presumed to involve practices of close association, familiarity and privileged knowledge,...

Introduction In the 1990s, researchers seriously began to investigate children's views (Hill and Tisdall, 1997; Christensen and James, 2000), complementing earlier research on young people aged 16+ (Hutson and Jenkins, 1989; Wallace, 1989; Banks et al, 1992). With the exception of a few pioneering studies (Mitchell, 1985), this was the first time c...

This article uses data from a survey of young adults in Kirkcaldy, Fife, together with associated qualitative interviews, to throw empirical light on their sense of control over their lives and their perceived willingness and ability to plan their lives. Its principal conclusion, contrary to the suggestions of much previous literature, is that a ma...

Action, Reaction, Inaction? Young Adults' Citizenship in Britain. This paper examines young adults' orientations to citizenship in Britain, drawing on surveys of random samples of 18-24 year olds. A range of experiences, behaviour and attitudes are explored including: citizenship education, voting, attitude to voting, party affiliation, participati...

This paper is part of a body of more general work on aspects of forethought, which has been undertaken in Edinburgh over the past twenty years. It offers some answers to what might seem to be an obvious, yet seldom asked, question: is there any connection between planning one's family, and exercising forethought and planning in other areas of one's...

How possible is it for the state to steer family values and relationships? How do we assess competing claims of harm and benefit from state action and inaction? What kind of engagement should we seek between the state and our personal lives? This collection debates the relationship between institutions of the state and families in all their diversi...

The demise of marrying as the rite of passage that coincides with exit from the parental household, solemnizing the establishment of a new household and commitment to a sexual partner is well documented across a range of wealthy western countries. It is less certain whether being single is simultaneously being ‘talked up’ (discursively produced) an...

This collection debates the appropriate relationship between families in all their diversity and the institutions of the state, engaging with claims about the benefits and harms of state actions for personal lives. The collection includes detailed nation-specific studies of aspects of state-family engagement and contributions written in a British,...

The contrast between the service class and the working class is central to much class analysis. This structural distinction, based on differences in the employment relationship, is analytically powerful, has validity, and is not in question here. The working class, however, is not homogeneous in all respects. This paper focuses on a sizeable group...

This paper reviews theoretical approaches to the key concepts of 'identity' and 'citizenship' exploring their implications for the possibilities of European citizenship and European identity1. In many circumstances and for many people, 'being European' is more likely to be an abstract categorizing of self and/or others rather than a strongly felt s...

The limited and sometimes contradictory published literature, mostly relating to younger age groups and non-British societies, suggests that planning and a longer time perspective are inhibited by economic insecurity, by tight structuring of the life course, and a track record of failing to achieve ambitions. This paper uses survey data, backed by...

Theorising Identity, Nationality and Citizenship: Implications for European Citizenship Identity. This paper reviews theoretical approaches to the key concepts of 'identity' and 'citizenship' exploring their implications for the possibilities of European citizenship and European identity. In many circumstances and for many people, 'being European'...

The claims that locality, kinship, and social class are no longer the basis of ties that bind and of limited significance for identity in late modernity, remain seductive, despite their critics. Those who remain rooted are then presented as inhabitants of traditional backwaters, outside the mainstream of social change. This article presents young p...

It has recently been claimed that a particular form of intimacy, `the pure relationship' is increasingly sought in personal life. For a couple, `the pure relationship' involves opening out to each other, enjoying each other's unique qualities and sustaining trust through mutual disclosure. Anthony Giddens (1992) postulates a transformation of intim...

On 19 January 1994 in Scotland, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the rape conviction of Brian Jamieson1 who had been found guilty of this and other independent crimes in May 1993. Jamieson was immediately released from custody (on bail awaiting the outcome of a continued appeal on a separate charge of attempted murder) to the consternation of t...

It is widely believed that parents in contemporary Western industrialised societies are less able or willing to control their children’s behaviour than those of previous generations. This is evidenced in the blaming of parents for a variety of social ills — a recurring refrain among Conservative politicians and newspaper columnists. Some go so far...

Our investigation of some of the processes involved in the emergence of ‘the modern family’is based on evidence from oral histories conducted with people who grew up in Scottish farming and crofting families in the early decades of the century. After showing how peasant and capitalist modes of production shaped both family structures and strategies...