Sociology of Everyday Life in the Past and Future Uses of the Mass Observation Project: Methodology,Materiality and Personal Life

Abstract

This article, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sociological Research Online, explores the sociological uses of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) for the study of everyday life. Mass Observation has been entangled with British sociology since the growth of the movement in the early 20th century, but has found most use as an archive for historians. After a hiatus in the mid-20th century, MO was renewed in the 1980s, with a new panel of respondents, as the Mass Observation Project. Directives for MOP started to come from sociologists in the 1990s, and following a series of digitisation efforts, the MOP has found increasing use in contemporary sociology. The article reviews some of the ways in which MOP has been written about in Sociological Research Online. It explores thinking on qualitative methodology and the particularities of mass observation data; material culture in and of the archive; and family and personal life. We explore and reflect upon the disconnection between publishing on mass observation as a methodology, and using mass observation data to explore sociological themes, arguing for a more synthetic approach that understands the value of the archive’s nature in understanding sociological issues. We conceptualise this as ‘dual materiality’ and conclude by posing some questions about the sociological futures of Mass Observation.

Introduction: sociological research and mass observation

In this article celebrating the history of Sociological Research Online (SRO), we explore the strength of coverage of sociological work using data from the Mass Observation Project, focusing on work in SRO, but drawing on scholarship elsewhere to help contextualise this work.

SRO materialised – in part – as a response to technological change, during a period of Internet culture which perhaps seems quaint today. The academic excitement in the period sparked poetic expositions of digital futures: spiralling networks of sociological collage in a postmodern explosion of intellectual practice. The inaugural editorial welcomed this anticipated transformation: ‘It is important, we believe crucial, for the discipline of Sociology not only to make full use of the possibilities that these new developments occasion, but also to do so in ways fully informed by Sociology itself’ (Bulmer and Stanley, 1996: 1).

The question of what sociology is for, what form it should take, and how it should achieve its purposes, is – of course – more long-standing than the provocations of digital technology. The founders of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) already had these questions at the beating heart of their enterprise. Founded in 1937, Mass Observation (MO) remains an active independent social research organisation capturing people’s lived experiences, thoughts and opinions by issuing ‘directives’ for writing. The early phase of MO (1937s–1950s) was described by its co-founders as ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ (Harrison et al., 1937) and generated material in the form of surveys, diaries, observations and reports from its national panel of self-selecting volunteer writers and a smaller number of paid investigators. Hundreds of working-class and middle-class people devoted time to observing everyday life from their lay perspective, amassing a huge volume of data in the 1930s and 1940s on topics such as politics, marriage and gender, race and class, as well as mundane experiences of things like food, clothing, newspapers and cinema. It provided a powerful lens on experiences during WWII of rationing, evacuation, propaganda, conscription and so on. Clearly of value, it’s advocates disagreed on the specifics of what MO was supposed to do for social science and for society, as they each sought to make sense of its operation and findings in the swirling morass of Marxism, surrealism, humanism and physical and biological sciences of the day (Hubble, 2005). Certainly, some at least seemed to understand it as a challenge to the dominant political view of working-class and middle-class lives (Sheridan, 2005), producing – as it did – more colourful and creative pictures of human experience in Britain, to ‘challenge the blandness of official rhetoric’ (Finch, 1988: 94). As the focus group came to dominate in the corporate sphere of advertising and public perception studies, and after government created its own means of observing the masses for management of morale during the war, MO fell out of use (Sheridan, 2005) and was subsumed into a commercial enterprise. But it still played a significant role in the shaping of British qualitative sociological work.

Indeed, its value was recognised some decades later and MO was restarted under the leadership of Professor Pocock, Sociologist at the University of Sussex, who took over the custodianship of the archive in 1976 (Sheridan, 1993). The Silver Jubilee of 1977 initiated a call for contributions from people on their experiences and observations of celebratory street parties to mark this occasion, which spurred the relaunch of a national panel in 1981, with the much-anticipated wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in June of that year. And this provided ground to launch a new directive in Summer 1981 appealing for contributions on the topics of currency, the royal wedding, business premises, unemployment, holidays and food. As Pocock wrote to respondents writing for this first directive of the newly named Mass Observation Project (MOP): ‘we would like you to report on the basis of your own experience of what you observe and what you hear. Nothing is too trivial and you will be surprised, I think, how quickly your eyes and ears become attuned’ (Summer Directive, 1981).

Today, mass observers receive a directive three times a year which contains two to three themes. A series of open questions guide the respondents, encouraging them to reflect on their thoughts, opinions and experiences. At times this could include other tasks such as producing a diary, the submission of an illustration or photograph, or generation of a list. Thousands of people have now taken part in MOP since 1981, many of them writing for years, if not decades, with potentially hundreds of panellists responding to any given directive. Subjects explored through MOP directives have retained semblance with those from the original incarnation, exploring politics, work, home and material culture. It has also occasionally nodded to the surrealist coverage of the early work, for example with directives exploring magic and mystery, dreams and superstitions.

A digital transformation is the most recent of the twists and turns of MO’s institutional relationships and form. Since 2006, MOP has been in a commercial partnership with the publisher Adam Matthews (AM). This has resulted in the production of Mass Observation Online, a digital resource containing archive material, essays and interactive tools on the early phase (1937–1950s) as well as of the Mass Observation Project 1981–2009 digital resource. Both are available for purchase by Higher Education institutions internationally, usually procured through university libraries. Open access digital resources also exist, including ‘Mass Observing the 1980s’ and the ‘Mass Observing COVID-19’ online databases, as well as small collections deposited in the UK Data Service.

SRO and MO therefore have a tangled intellectual and material history, shaped by the theoretical and political concerns of form and method in sociological scholarship, but also by the sociotechnical transformations of the public sphere and mass media, and the growth of secondary qualitative data analysis. And they share a publishing history, as SRO quickly became the most prominent venue for discussions about secondary data analysis. It thereby also became one of the main outlets for publishing on and with MO data.

It is the latter phase, from the 1981 relaunch of MOP, that forms the focus of this article. Since the 1980s, most directives have been generated by the archive staff, who create guides and prompts which it is hoped will enable any observer, regardless of age or life experience to respond. The topics have spoken to issues of the day, or recalled previous subjects that have been explored in MOP, thereby producing longitudinal observations of some key social phenomena (e.g. around gender, politics, science, crime). Other directives have been developed collaboratively with academics across disciplines through ‘commissions’, shaping the questions posed to observers to align with the research interests of those commissioning them. The responses to these directives are also shared open access with anyone who wishes to view them. Significantly, most directives have been commissioned by sociologists, ¹ perhaps reflecting the predominance of the contemporary rather than historical in sociological thinking and research.

Mass observers frame their responses in their own format and style and offer richly open, and at times raw, accounts of their everyday lived thoughts and feelings. For example, the recent COVID-19 submissions narrated palpable emotion as lives were transformed day-by-day, year-by-year (Clarke and Barnett, 2023; Lyon and Coleman, 2023; Scantlebury and Pattrick, 2021). The elements of anonymity, time, space and the trusting relationship with MO as an organisation add value to the method (Bytheway, 2009; May, 2016; Smart et al., 2012) in ways that go beyond traditional sociological encounters with participants. And commissioning a directive allows sociologists relatively fast access to a large number of responses.

How, then, have sociologists used and understood mass observation as a methodology, and in what areas of scholarship have they used it? This article explores this question through the lens of publishing on MO in SRO, but broadening out to the wider scholarship, too. It evidences a strong interest in understanding how mass observation works as a method. However, this is largely developed independently from research using MO data to address sociological phenomena. We demonstrate this and explore the consequences in the context of three key themes in MO publishing: methods and methodology, material culture, and family/ personal life. This helps us work up a concept of ‘dual materiality’ and argue for a ‘synthetic’ approach to analysing the data in MO. We conclude by exploring some questions about the sociological futures of the archive given these analyses, drawing out continuities and change with regard to our opening comments on digital media, and pointing to some considerations that others might wish to make when engaging with MOP in their research. In doing so, the piece celebrates the history of both Sociological Research Online and Mass Observation, drawing out some affinities and shared history between the two.

MOP methodologies

Explorations of MOP as an archive and related methodological concerns are well-reflected in SRO (Casey et al., 2014; Hurdley, 2014; Kramer, 2014; Lindsey and Bulloch, 2014; Moor and Uprichard, 2014). This is probably because, as SRO developed, its digital nature made it a natural home for discussions about secondary data analysis, a mode of scholarship often facilitated by the digital medium. Indeed, SRO became a key home to the developing debate about the status, uses and problems of qualitative secondary data analysis (Mason, 2007) and MOP’s ambiguous status was often reflected in these debates (Duncan, 2012), which too often lapsed into a rather wearying dead end of valorisation versus fearmongering. The best work on secondary analysis in the qualitative space understood the epistemological continuum between primary data collection and so-called ‘reuse’ of data. As Moore (2007: 9–10) cogently concludes, for instance, ‘Eschewing our comfort zones, and developing a more creative, and even messy, approach may be the key to opening up the full potential of qualitative data reuse’. MO has played a key role in this expansion of secondary analysis in sociology, and is well-suited – given its surrealist, anthropological and political origins – to a more creative or messy disposition. But sociological work with MO tends towards a traditionalism, making it fit into established qualitative methodology, rather than reworking qualitative methodology around MO’s character and quirks.

Sociologists have used MOP as the sole data source for their research (e.g. Lyon and Coleman, 2023; Scott and Lockwood, 2024), used it comparatively or longitudinally with early MO (e.g. Clarke et al., 2017; Savage, 2007), and in a mixed-methods approach with other sources of data, on large-scale research projects (Hurdley, 2006; Hurdley, 2013; Lindsey, 2022; Lindsey and Bulloch, 2014). The ways in which sociologists engage with MO data reflect the variety of research questions that can be asked with it, and there has been a general growth in scholarship on MOP since the 1980s (Casey et al., 2014).

Despite the rise of interest in the archive, there is a schism in the literature between research papers using MO data and those exploring MO methodologically. The scope of what can be achieved in the short length of journal articles has contributed to a tendency to blackbox mass observation as an archive and method when drawing on its data, instead focusing on the content of observers’ accounts, thus treating MO as if it were interview data. Discussion of the particularities and peculiarities of the method largely takes place in papers specifically exploring MOP as an archive which correspondingly tend not to examine substantive sociological issues.

Methodological considerations of working with the data represent a major theme in SRO publishing on MO. For instance, in some of the earliest work, Sheridan (1993) provides fascinating insights from the inside of MOP, exploring the way in which writers slip between writing about their own subjective experiences and making efforts towards a received idea of objective social reportage based on their observations of others, the media, and so on. She also points out a powerful temporal dimension of MOP, namely that Observers might write for years, and sometimes decades, about their experiences. As Sheridan notes, this produces fragmentary but layered accounts of their day-to-day lives and shifting observations of social experience, developing a strange genre of autobiography akin to, but also distinct from, diary writing (Sheridan, 1993). Sheridan’s insights on MOP as a method for understanding daily experience remain some of the most astute, though they veer into psychological readings as they attempt to make sense of the observers’ mindsets and affective experiences of writing. And perhaps this can only be expected when the nature of mass observation leads us to ruminate on the motives and intentions of that set of people who have been consistently contributing their thinking and experiences to MO for over three decades. What keeps them writing?

Partly, the answer could be that mass observers become quasi-experts in observation of social life, which must have its own rewards. For sociology, this is a key strength of working with MO, particularly for those of us interested in everyday experience and its connections to structures of power, community values, historical change and so forth. As Kramer articulates, MO creates and operationalises a kind of ‘dual vision’:

Mass Observation offers considerable sociological knowledge and insight because, uniquely, it facilitates what I have called ‘dual vision’. Mass Observers play two roles, commenting on and documenting social life more broadly on the one hand, and on the other, documenting personal experiences. They are then both the observers and the self-observed. This exploration of personal experience, alongside ‘bearing witness’ to the experience of others, means that personal experience is linked to social observation in a way which facilitates reflexivity. This link between experience and social observation generates valuable sociological knowledge and insights about the distinctiveness or representativeness of different sets of social experiences and knowledge. (Kramer, 2014: 10)

MO’s value for sociological thinking and study, then, is evident. What is more curious, perhaps, is that MO remains under-used given the sheer scale and richness of the archive, the unique quality it permits of ‘dual vision’, and its ease of access. It remains a marginal method in the broad scheme of qualitative researching. And in part this is likely due to the strange nature of MO compared to the more traditional methods on which qualitative sociologists lean.

Lindsey and Bulloch (2014) describe the situation around 10 years ago as one shaped by institutional factors, leaving MOP a site of great sociological potential but not neatly aligned with sociological practices. Some things have changed but much remains as it was, particularly the institutional, funding and government landscapes in which qualitative research must be carried out, justified, used and applied. At the time of writing, Lindsey and Bulloch (2014: 3) also found that most sociologists used MOP data ‘thematically and cross-sectionally, focusing on responses to a given theme at given points in time’. This is as true today as it was then. Despite the growth in creative methods of data collection, and the expansion of arts-based practices of research in the social sciences, the dominance of thematic analysis as a qualitative approach has only further intensified. In part, this is likely due to its standardisation and banalisation in the areas of psychology, health studies and other disciplines. Here, the closer proximity to the gravitational pull of quantitative knowledge production and positivist methodology has led to a use of thematic analysis as a quasi-positivist means of approaching qualitative data. Qualitative data software have supported this move, facilitating a (re)turn to certain ideas of reproducibility and rigour, alongside particular forms of justification within neoliberal structures of research. Still, there remains much scope for experiment with MOP and it is encouraging that MO does not seem to have been weakened by these broader transformations in the academy, even if thematic analysis and narrative analysis predominate in its use.

Over the past decade or two, longitudinal research has gradually come to be a key part of sociological and sociohistorical scholarship using MO. Lindsey and Bulloch (2014) provide a good case in point. Clarke et al. (2017, 2018); also demonstrate longitudinal experimentation with MOP, utilising responses from 13 directives across both phases of MO alongside a commissioned 2014 directive ‘Politics and Politicians’ that incorporated questions repeated from the earlier period. Their approaches take advantage of the particular and perhaps singular nature of the archive that Sheridan (1993) points to: that it persists over time, continuing to elicit narrative, creative expression and social commentary from its panel, as their lives change in dialogue with the world around them.

More recently, efforts have been made to innovate with mass observation by engaging MOP with more traditional methods. Scott and Lockwood (2024) added a unique element to their 2020 commission of ‘Nothing and the road not taken’ by conducting follow-up interviews with observers. This was managed by MO, breaking new ground in the link between researcher and observer. It was carefully orchestrated to ensure respondents understood there was no expectation to participate in this further activity. However, the response was positive and the outcome provided interesting insights into how MOP panellists make sense of everyday life when engaged through different research methodologies.

And yet, due to the schism in publishing between substantive content and methodological reflections, the nuances of and creative possibilities of working with mass observation remain lacking. So there remain important opportunities to improve our engagements with MOP as sociologists by better attending to the fact that MOP is an archive, that is, a material, physical thing with particular qualities. As Moor and Uprichard (2014: 3) describe:

This link between the specific material form of the archived responses and the kinds of knowledge that can be created with them comes from the capacity of the formal properties of the responses (paper, layout, writing and type) to supplement, modify or even contradict the communication ‘inside’ the responses. Researchers are well aware of the capacity of archive materials to surprise or move the reader. What is less common is for them to produce work that reflects explicitly on the meanings they have made from these material qualities.

Their excellent piece goes on to demonstrate how some of this can be achieved, bringing the material culture of mass observation itself into the study of sociological phenomena, a move familiar to those who work with documents on a regular basis but still fairly alien to mainstream sociology and its allied sub-disciplines.

Mass observation’s strangeness is its key power and potential. As Hurdley (2014) incisively points out, the materiality of MO is awkward and unwieldy, it resists easy description and invites us to consider the material, visual and poetic qualities of items in MO. Hurdley’s analysis points to the way in which MO documents push at the boundaries of sociological knowledge-making processes and leave us with exciting questions regarding how exactly to deal with this kind of unruly matter. The scholarship on the methodology of MO in SRO shows that much can be learned from understanding material culture in, of and through MOP, but that our ways of knowing in sociology have still to fully grapple with these qualities of its materiality. The changes in MOP that have occurred since its digitisation through partnership with Adam Matthews are even less well charted or understood.

Materiality in and of the archive

Material culture has been featured prominently as a theme in directives since the archive’s inception. From topics including games and jigsaws (1937–1941), Christmas cards (Winter 1983 Directive) and plastics (Spring 2019 Directive), a multitude of objects and things have received MOP attention. Material objects appear in MO accounts partly because of these focused directives, inviting observers to reflect on the stuff that features in their lives, whether in their homes, offices, shops, or so on. But material culture also permeates the archive as a whole, cropping up in responses to directives about any number of topics, as well as having a prominent role in people’s day diaries, collected each 12 May. The everyday, by its nature, invites such attention to the materials of mundane experience, since material things figure in our routine habits and practices, moving with us through life, anchoring our social relations, shaping our experiences, reflecting and refracting the effects and emotions of our biographies. And mass observers often write from home, whether in their living rooms, offices, bedrooms or wherever, where they are surrounded by the stuff of life as they reflect on their experiences. ²

And yet, few papers in SRO have discussed the materiality of MO. Pieces that do engage with objects and materials often fail to engage with their agency, and tend towards a focus on how things are enveloped within the life course. Thus, objects become focal points for autobiographical and biographical accounts of everyday life, rather than things with life themselves. The human-centred mode of analysis is not unusual for sociological work using MOP data more broadly. Given the often autobiographical nature of respondents’ accounts it is perhaps understandable that sociologists have been inclined to view objects as serving human storytelling. Two pieces which exemplify this are Bhatti’s (2014) ‘Garden stories’ and Nettleton and Uprichard’s (2011) ‘A Slice of Life’, both of which draw on object-focused narratives from MOP responses to illuminate how everyday practices such as gardening and eating are interwoven with biographies.

Bhatti (2014) draws on the 1998 directive ‘The Garden and Gardening’, which asked respondents to write about their personal encounters with gardens including ‘childhood memories; the personal significance of certain plants; and differences in terms of gardening tasks and how these may be changing’ (Bhatti, 2014: 3). Bhatti focuses on the story of MO respondent ‘Joy’, whose account is written in typically autobiographical style, starting with Joy’s early garden memories before proceeding through her life and garden encounters to date. Throughout, objects and materials figure in Joy’s recollections: from lilacs planted in an alcove in her childhood garden to the affectionately named ‘Tree’ – a willow tree in her current garden which Joy considers as ‘family’. As Bhatti illustrates, the garden is entwined with Joy’s biography, shaping and reshaping her identity as her life progresses; it is a space for empowerment and expression.

Nettleton and Uprichard’s (2011) ‘A Slice of Life’ approaches MOP data in a similar way, but with food as the focal object. It adopts a longitudinal approach, analysing data from MOA food diaries in 1945 alongside the Winter 1982 directive on ‘Food, including drink’. This longitudinal approach compares two different types of MO data (diaries and directive responses) and with different individuals over a period of time (see also Savage, 2007), as opposed to the more common MOP longitudinal approach of comparing the same individuals’ responses to directives on similar topics at different points in time (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). Just as with the Bhatti paper, materials and objects are foregrounded by accounts of daily menus and weekly food diaries, alongside numerous mentions of food types and brands from brussels sprouts to Hovis bread. A lot of attention is also paid to eggs! The focus on food enables the authors to illuminate how food is not just interwoven with the life course but is central to understanding social change. As Nettleton and Uprichard (2011: 8) note, MO accounts ‘disclose how food and eating appears to be inextricably interwoven into the texture of people’s social relations, life course and social positions’.

What both of these papers do is make visible how attending to objects and materials within MOP helps to make sense of and understand the life course. Drawing on autobiographical accounts of engagements and practices with mundane things, they illuminate the significance of objects and materials for understanding identity, gender, cultural repertoires, family relationships and practices of home-making, and, importantly, how these shift over time. While such approaches are undoubtedly valuable to the field, and MO research more specifically, the authors’ use of objects and materials to understand the life course often renders silent the very objects which colour and bring to life such accounts. In other words, the objects and materials which are central in respondents’ narratives, become a vessel through which to explore other themes, rather than a topic of interest in their own right. This peripheralisation of materiality has resonances with older consumption studies and material culture debates regarding object-subject dualism and what have been critiqued as ‘symbol over substance’ approaches (Crewe and Gregson, 1998: 40). Although the objects in MOP accounts are rarely spectacular or conspicuous, the focus on objects as markers of the subject’s (respondent’s) identity and as symbols of culture largely ignores their thingness: their material capacities, qualities, and sensibilities.

The materiality of MO data has been better developed in some pockets of scholarship, though. The extent to which they prioritise either the object or the subject varies, but nonetheless, objects and materials have some agency. For example Hurdley (2013), in her work on mantelpieces, engages with the objects and materials of MO responses, while also drawing on lifecourse biographies. Hurdley considers a 1937 MOA report on mantelpieces alongside responses to a 1983 directive simply called ‘Mantelpieces’. Her work interweaves the material significance of mantelpiece objects with the autobiographical accounts of respondents while simultaneously illuminating the influence of the changing social, cultural, political and economic landscape. As Hurdley (2013: 63) notes, discussing the 1937 MOA report:

it is there in the broken clocks, the chipped ornaments, the endless old tea and toffee tins used for storing bits and pieces [. . .] although this might be an ideal home story the details tell different tales. Even the hairpins, hat elastic and collar studs, which now look charming in their simplicity, are reminders that most bedrooms were unheated, the fires lit only for the bedridden, and so much of what might now be considered ‘private’ took place before the mirror and the heat of the main fire.

Such materially rich descriptions transport the reader to the mantelpiece and the socio-material significance of the bits and pieces upon it, illuminating, among many other things, family and household relations, the gendered division of labour, and wider shifts in domestic practices. This materially focused engagement with MOP has similarly been repeated in studies on circulations of family objects as a means of ‘doing kinship’ (Holmes, 2019) and on moralities of thrift and recycling (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022), which take account of MOP’s autobiographical nature but do not prioritise it. In this way, objects play more agentic roles in the ways of knowing that we can adopt in sociological research with the archive.

In the previous section on methodology, we pointed to the split in understanding the archive as a method, and in using its content for substantive sociological analysis. Some of the studies here go some way towards overcoming that tension, evidencing a more synthetic approach to working with the archive, which is no surprise given their focus on material culture. But there is still some room for the materiality of archive materials themselves to play a fuller role in this scholarly approach (Hurdley, 2013; Hurdley, 2014; Moor and Uprichard, 2014). How can the pages, the pen lines, the photographs, magazine clippings and tea-stained corners of a page figure in our analyses? In sum, tensions exist within analyses of MO data as to what takes centre stage and what becomes peripheral when grappling with the ways in which the everyday appears in MO accounts.

We propose also to go further and ask how the everyday makes possible such accounts in MO. The material culture of the homes of mass observers is both the setting in which their observations take place, and the subject of observation. As with Kramer’s (2014) conceptualisation of mass observer’s ‘dual-vision’, in which respondents are both observer and self-observed, we can conceptualise the everyday spaces and material culture of observers’ lives as the ‘dual matter’ of mass observation: they make mass observation possible as material infrastructure in and through which observers’ research takes place, and they are the matter of that research. What we have yet to fully understand is how these things come to matter in this dual fashion, opening up important lines of study in the epistemology of mass observation.

MOP’s entanglement in family and personal life

Although families and personal life have featured in several Mass Observation Directives, there are only a handful of articles in SRO that focus on these topics (though they are more developed in publications appearing in other journals). We discuss here three papers which best showcase SRO’s work on everyday phenomena of family and personal life, but which also analyse not only the substantive sociological topic at hand (social class, nothingness, family history) but also the particularities of MOP as data and as a method, providing some evidence for the potential of bringing MO’s quirky character into understanding of social phenomena which it documents.

The first paper, by Kramer (2014), gets some way towards this by developing the ‘dual vision’ concept. Kramer focuses on the Summer 2008 Directive on ‘Doing Family History Research’. In her analysis, respondents’ dual vision comes from the fact that they are not only documenting their own personal experiences of family for future research but also act as social observers of their families, consciously gleaning knowledge from their family networks and practices. According to Kramer, this evidences a kind of everyday reflexivity that is part of autobiographical life writing, whereby observers ‘write not just as an individual with relevant experience to relate, but also as members of a specific social group, writing as an adopted person, as a young person, as a second son, and so on’ (Kramer, 2014: 7). By placing their personal experiences in social context, Mass Observers attempt to distinguish between that which is unique to their lives and those aspects that are illustrative of wider social phenomena, while also showing awareness of the fact that their social location places limits on their knowledge:

This attentiveness to context means that many Mass Observers offer reflexive and considered accounts of social life in which they describe how they imagine and embed themselves in their social, geographical and temporal context, and they further consider the role that this context has played in shaping their experiences, dispositions and attitudes. This enables us to explore not only how social location frames and shapes the accounts which are presented, but also to explore how Mass Observers present their dispositions, attitudes and experiences as being inextricably linked to, and understood within, the context of their social location. (Kramer, 2014: 7)

We propose that this analysis could be pushed further so as to come closer to the truly synthetic approach we’re advocating. This would entail taking the dual vision in observers’ writing as subject matter itself, for example, as evidence of how people employ this particular kind of reflexivity to ‘do’ family.

The remaining two papers, by Savage (2007) and Scott and Lockwood (2024), draw attention to the nature of MOP accounts as autobiographical texts. Savage’s (2007) longitudinal work draws on data from two different points in time – the September 1948 Directive on ‘Social Class’ and the Spring 1990 Directive on ‘Social Divisions’ – to explore the commonalities and differences in the narration of class experiences. He finds that although both directives yield relatively ambiguous narratives about class, the respondents in the 1990s were much more confident in their management of class narratives and more willing to engage in and deploy multiple stories about class in their responses. Another notable shift is that while in 1948, observers on the whole offered succinct definitions of class and viewed class as a matter of family lineage, by 1990 the responses had evolved into autobiographical accounts of how class is lived and experienced, where class was understood as a matter of individual ascription. The value of qualitive accounts such as those provided by MO data is, according to Savage (2007: 10–11), that they ‘allow us to excavate these ambiguities, since it is the form, rather than the content, of class talk which is important’. Thus Savage’s analysis comes close to the synthetic approach to MO data as social reportage and social substance that we advocate.

Scott and Lockwood (2024) also attend to form and to the ways in which personal life is narrated. They use a single case study, taken from the Summer Directive 2010 on ‘Belonging’, to examine how people make sense of and tell stories about imagined lives they have not lived. In contrast to how autobiographical accounts are usually understood, as ones of ‘positive formation’, they are instead interested in the storytelling of ‘nothing’ and explore biographies and identities that are ‘negatively defined by things we miss, lose, choose against, or events that never happened’ (Scott and Lockwood, 2024: 2). They note that autobiographical accounts are told as nested stories where authors move between different narrative orders and temporal perspectives to create alternative ‘non-selves’. In so doing, narratives uproot, mislead and obscure as much as they offer an account of a seemingly coherent self. This style of autobiographical work of self and non-self is made possible by the nature of mass observers’ writing for MO: the understanding of self that emerges from MO accounts is a result of its form and content.

Savage (2007) and Scott and Lockwood (2024) thus bring the formal qualities of storytelling to the foreground. Savage diagnoses key differences in the everyday experience of class through shifts in narrative style, and in the changing ways MO respondents narrate class. Scott and Lockwood attend to the temporal complexity of self-narration, alongside aspects of narrative emplotment and the positioning of the narrative vis-à-vis imagined audiences. A wealth of sociological scholarship has demonstrated the contemporary importance of biography and storytelling practices for how we understand ourselves, our families and our personal lives (Plummer, 1994; Stanley, 1993). Indeed, investigating self-narration is a mainstay of social science enquiry into personal life and a key phenomenon through which the self is understood. Arguably, Savage (2007) and Scott and Lockwood (2024) both focus on narrative form to exploit the link between quotidian narration about family and personal life, on the one hand, and the (auto)biographical qualities of MO data on the other. People are, after all, quite used to telling stories about their families and their personal lives (Morgan, 2020). Since the way participants narrate their family and personal lives in the data theoretically tessellates with everyday narrative practices, MOP offers researchers a unique vantage point as regards how people go about telling mundane family and personal life stories. Being a mass observer, therefore, might shape how and whether the story of the self (or non-self) gets told.

Having said this, all three pieces stop short of integrating material culture into the understanding of the form of mass observation. These aren’t just narratives about class or self, they are material narratives about class or self, with aesthetic properties on the page that go beyond narrative form, and into the form of the archive itself. For instance, the fact that many observers write by hand means that we read their accounts through the physical marks on a page made through embodied practice. As Moor and Uprichard (2014: 7) put it, ‘Making sense of handwritten or typed responses requires accounting for the affordances of different media and their effects on the writing (and remembering) subject’. Class is in the paper, self is in the ink. Bringing all these elements together would help us to better use MO as a material archive with particular aesthetic qualities and styles.

But all of this would still not get us quite as far as we need to go. The final step would be to put MO back into the lives of observers. To date, there has been little consideration of the consequences that participation in MO might have on the lives of observers themselves, bringing us back to Sheridan’s initial, quasi-psychoanalytic readings of observers’ motives for writing. How does being an observer shape a person? How does MO shape everyday lives, themselves? And whose lives fit with MO, allowing them to observe in the first place? And whose do not?

Many mass observers are regular respondents who spend considerable time observing and reporting on the topics they are requested to address by each Directive (Sheridan, 1993). MOP may make use of people’s natural inclination to observe their friends and family, and to narrate stories about themselves and others. But, as noted by Kramer (2014), it also triggers (or catalyses) a reflexive orientation to mundane life. A Directive might, for example, draw observers’ attention to familiar aspects of their life in a way that defamiliarises these. MOP might also provide a venue for the telling of personal stories that would not otherwise have found an audience or that Mass Observers would hesitate to tell their friends and family. Smart et al. (2012) and May (2016), for example, have proffered that the anonymity of MOP, the fact that Mass Observers are not able to witness the reaction of their audience, and the trusted relationship that Mass Observers develop with the archive, mean that they have a safe space in which to open up about sensitive and difficult topics in their lives and relationships in a way they might not do in ordinary interaction. How does participating in long-term reflection of this type, on mundane, sensitive and political topics, shape a person’s experience of those things in turn?

If MOP draws on already-existing reflexive habits – the way people are already observers, narrators, and analysts of their own lives – it also changes these habits by ritualising them in a particular way, shaping self-narration as much as documenting it. Three times a year observers are invited to focus on their own lives, and the lives of people around them, through a new lens. And being an observer for a long period of time probably permeates their day-to-day experience, seeping into bus journeys, family mealtimes, writing a Christmas card, or buying some plastic shampoo bottles – all things that mass observers have been asked to write about. Further scholarship on MOP might therefore explore the impact that routinely – and consciously – taking up their ‘dual vision’ within the ‘dual matter’ of personal and family life has on mass observers. This might involve investigating how existing storytelling practices, perspectives, and reflections have changed through participation in the project. Or indeed what sort of figure the MOP plays in peoples’ lives – as a penpal or even family member in its own right.

Conclusion: mass observation’s sociological futures

SRO has been a key home for publishing on MO, particularly on themes of methodology, materiality and personal life. Although there has been a general separation between publishing on MO as a method and publishing using MO data to address substantive sociological themes, SRO articles have begun to bridge this divide. There remains scope to better integrate form and content in analyses that make use of the materiality of the archive itself, to recognise the ‘dual matter’ of mass observation’s institutional and everyday infrastructure, and to see the doing of MO in the lives of respondents as part of their dual vision. Such a synthetic approach would allow sociologists to make the most of the different forms of knowledge offered by MO data. And we must do more to understand social change in mass observation infrastructure. Ways of writing have changed since the start of MOP’s revival in 1981, due to changes in how people use and relate to texts and publics. Today, it is common for people to write on a regular basis for public consumption, in different forms (tweets, blog posts, comments on newspapers, Reddit, etc.). Such practices have, presumably, shaped the habits and aesthetic tastes of younger writers in particular. Relatedly, the imagined audience of MOP writing has likely changed or multiplied due to technosocial change, shifts in the MOP’s structure (digitalisation), and changes to publishing (open access, etc.). Panellists could now Google their ID number and find uses of their writing far more easily than ever before. This raises the question of how the relationship between respondent, researcher and MO as an organisation has shifted amid all this sociotechnical transformation.

As more sociologists have begun to engage with MO data, we must also recognise that we are not neutral actors. The epistemic practices, professional dispositions and intellectual history of our discipline are beginning to shape MO as an organisation and archive. Sociologists are the main commissioners of directives, and have begun to change how observers are understood. For example, sociologists have pushed for greater information about the panellists, so there is now an optional form created by MO for newly recruited observers to complete if they wish, which asks them for basic demographic information. The archivists and the MOP board of trustees took care to ensure that in responding to requests from academic researchers, they remained true to the spirit of MO and protected the panellists’ anonymity and agency. Sociologists have recently also engaged observers through more traditional forms of qualitative research, interviewing them about their participation in MOP (Scott and Lockwood, 2024), in addition to which they have begun asking important questions about research ethics and MOP (van Emmerik, 2024). What remains to be seen is how this will affect the dual materiality of MO as method.

Relatedly, the digitalisation of MO data has provided financial stability through partnership with a primary sources publishing company, Adam Matthew Digital, but this raises a number of questions which invite deeper exploration. We need to understand better how a synthetic approach to the archive is achieved when we access it from our workplaces, homes and in public spaces, rather than at The Keep in Brighton. The materiality changes, rather than disappears. Computer screens, Internet browser interfaces, PDFs, these are all still material culture and will re-shape how we feel with, respond to, and analyse the archive. What is gained and lost in the digitalisation of MOP? How does this change our relationship to MOP as an archive and how we know about the everyday world through the archive?

And what are the implications of the commercialisation of MOP data? Adam Matthew is a corporate entity that makes money from providing the MO archive(s) to higher education institutions. How do we reconcile this with MO’s origins, and the spirit of its re-birth in the 1980s?

Finally, does the potential of the digital space still remain for sociology? SRO’s first editorial announced the hope for a transformation of our publishing practices that might contribute to the liberatory project of the discipline. MOP’s digitalisation shows us that as things become more accessible and open to novel ways of exploration, it also renders the archive subject to waves of higher education marketisation and other tributaries of capital. How does all this change the synthetic orientation that we have advocated above? SRO’s legacy of publishing on secondary data analysis, particularly on MO data, makes it an ideal home for discussions of this sort, and MOP an excellent case for thinking through the wider ramifications of these developments in the discipline.