How did 'Thatcher's Children' Fare?: Investigating Crime and Victimisation in the Life-courses of Those Born in 1970

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This grant follows on from two earlier ESRC-funded grants held by Stephen, and a British Academy seminar he co-organised with Colin Hay (a leading theorist of Thatcherism). The first grant was a scoping project, which assessed the extent to which it was possible to undertake more prolonged and in-depth investigations into the social, economic and cultural impacts of Thatcherite public policy on contemporary UK society, especially as these features relate to criminal justice policy. This earlier grant concluded that it was possible to undertake two further projects. The first of these (looking at regional level changes using repeated cross-sectional surveys) we have, with ESRC-funding, completed. The second project (and the one we are seeking funding for herein) would extend this enquiry to the individual level using longitudinal data (thereby ensuring that we do not fall foul of committing the ecological fallacy - that is assuming that because something operates at the national level, it also works in the same way for individuals).To do this we will use data from the British Cohort Study which is a longitudinal study of a group of men and women born in one week in 1970. The cohort (which numbers over 17,000 people) have been interviewed themselves on a number of times (at ages 10, 16, 21, 26, 29, 34, 38 and 42) and there have been interviews with their mothers and teachers when they were younger. They were asked a range of questions about their home lives, schooling, employment careers, social attitudes and, crucially for us, since we are interested in how these processes lead people to or away from crime, their victimisation, drug taking, arrest history and offending. We have spent a long time theorising how the social and economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s might have operated to alter the social environments in which these young people grew up. Moreover, our analyses of changes in social attitudes in the country at the time and the extent to which these may have differed between generations allows us to 'locate' this cohort's experiences and values in wider contexts. By relying, where and when appropriate to do so, on a similar cohort study which went before this one (the National Child Development Study, participants born in 1958), we can disentangle the complex changes which occur as people age. This means that we are much less likely to misinterpret what looks like significant changes, but which are just a facet of aging and 'growing up'. As we saw in April 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died, there was a lot of public debate about what her time in office means now, with some arguing that she had been a great leader who had liberated Britain from bureaucracy, and others pointing to the decline of manufacturing, fragmenting of working class communities and increasing north-south divide as real social harms inflicted upon the country. With this in mind, we will explore the extent to which Thatcherite social values have become embedded in our wider society via a nationally representative social survey conducted by a large survey company. The project will also help to build capacity in UK social science by training two PhD students (funded by Sheffield University). Via the PhD students' training in cognitive interviewing, the employment of Dr. Emily Gray as a PhD supervisor, the attendance of all three at major international conferences, the production of a film and the promotion of that media as a vehicle for academics, we will make a lasting contribution to social science capacity in these arena. Stephen will continue to champion quantitative data analysis and will be well-placed to do this given the Faculty's Methods Institute and involvement in the ESRC-funded White Rose DTC. The Steering Committee will advise us on regional processes and the conducting of online surveys.