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

这笔赠款是在斯蒂芬早先由ESRC资助的两笔赠款以及他与科林·海伊(一位著名的撒切尔主义理论家)共同组织的英国学院研讨会上获得的。第一笔赠款是一个范围界定项目，该项目评估了在多大程度上可以对撒切尔夫人的公共政策对当代英国社会的社会、经济和文化影响进行更长期和深入的调查，特别是因为这些特征与刑事司法政策有关。这笔早些时候的赠款得出的结论是，有可能再开展两个项目。在ESRC资助下，我们已经完成了第一项工作(使用重复的横断面调查来观察地区层面的变化)。第二个项目(也是我们在这里寻求资金的项目)将使用纵向数据将这种调查扩展到个人层面(从而确保我们不会违反生态谬误--也就是假设因为某种东西在国家层面上运作，它对个人也是如此)。为此，我们将使用英国队列研究的数据，这是一项对1970年出生在一周内的一群男性和女性进行的纵向研究。这群人(超过17,000人)自己也接受了多次采访(年龄分别为10岁、16岁、21岁、26岁、29岁、34岁、38岁和42岁)，还曾在他们年轻时采访过他们的母亲和老师。他们被问到了一系列关于他们的家庭生活、学校教育、职业生涯、社会态度的问题，对我们来说至关重要的是，因为我们对这些过程如何引导人们走向或远离犯罪、他们的受害者、吸毒、逮捕历史和违法行为感兴趣。我们花了很长时间对20世纪80年代和90年代的社会和经济政策如何运作，以改变这些年轻人成长的社会环境进行了理论分析。此外，我们对当时该国社会态度变化的分析，以及这些变化在几代人之间可能存在的差异程度，使我们能够在更广泛的背景下‘定位’这一群体的经历和价值观。通过在适当的时间和地点依赖于之前的一项类似的队列研究(国家儿童发展研究，参与者出生于1958年)，我们可以理清随着人们年龄增长而发生的复杂变化。这意味着我们不太可能误解那些看似重大的变化，但这些变化只是衰老和成长的一个方面。正如我们在2013年4月玛格丽特·撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)去世时看到的那样，关于她在任期间现在意味着什么，公众进行了大量辩论，一些人认为，她是一位将英国从官僚作风中解放出来的伟大领导人，另一些人则指出，制造业的衰落、工人阶级社区的分裂和日益扩大的南北差距是对英国造成的真正社会伤害。考虑到这一点，我们将通过一家大型调查公司进行的具有全国代表性的社会调查，探索撒切尔夫人的社会价值观在多大程度上已经根植于我们更广泛的社会中。该项目还将通过培训两名博士生(由谢菲尔德大学资助)来帮助建设英国社会科学的能力。通过对博士生进行认知面谈培训，聘请艾米丽·格雷博士担任博士导师，所有三人都出席重要的国际会议，制作一部电影，并宣传该媒体作为学术媒介，我们将为这些领域的社会科学能力做出持久的贡献。斯蒂芬将继续支持定量数据分析，并将处于有利地位，鉴于学院的方法研究所和参与ESRC资助的白玫瑰DTC。指导委员会将就区域进程和开展在线调查向我们提供建议。

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.