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

在此之前，斯蒂芬曾两次获得esrc资助，并与撒切尔主义主要理论家科林•海伊（Colin Hay）共同组织了一次英国科学院研讨会。第一笔拨款是一个范围界定项目，该项目评估了在多大程度上可能对撒切尔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。这项较早的赠款的结论是，有可能再进行两个项目。在esrc的资助下，我们已经完成了其中的第一个（使用重复的横断面调查来观察区域层面的变化）。第二个项目（也是我们在此寻求资助的项目）将使用纵向数据将这一调查扩展到个人层面（从而确保我们不会犯生态谬论的错误——即假设某些事情在国家层面上起作用，它也以同样的方式对个人起作用）。为了做到这一点，我们将使用英国队列研究的数据这是一项对1970年在一周内出生的一组男性和女性的纵向研究。这群人（超过17000人）在10岁、16岁、21岁、26岁、29岁、34岁、38岁和42岁时接受了多次采访，还采访了他们年轻时的母亲和老师。他们被问及一系列问题，包括他们的家庭生活、学校教育、就业生涯、社会态度，以及对我们来说至关重要的一点，因为我们对这些过程是如何导致人们犯罪或远离犯罪、他们的受害经历、吸毒经历、被捕史和犯罪行为感兴趣。我们花了很长时间理论化20世纪80年代和90年代的社会和经济政策是如何改变这些年轻人成长的社会环境的。此外，我们对当时该国社会态度变化的分析，以及这些变化在代际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。在适当的时间和地点，我们可以依靠在此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），我们可以理清随着年龄增长而发生的复杂变化。这意味着我们不太可能误解看似重大的变化，但这只是衰老和“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）去世时所看到的那样，公众对她的任期现在意味着什么展开了大量辩论，一些人认为她是一位伟大的领导人，将英国从官僚主义中解放出来，而另一些人则指出，制造业的衰落、工人阶级社区的分裂以及南北分歧的加剧，才是英国真正的社会危害。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，探索撒切尔主义社会价值观在多大程度上融入了我们更广泛的社会。该项目还将通过培养两名博士生（由谢菲尔德大学资助）来帮助英国社会科学的能力建设。通过对博士生在认知访谈方面的培训，聘用Emily Gray博士作为博士生导师，参加这三者的主要国际会议，制作一部电影，并推广该媒体作为学术工具，我们将在这些领域为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，并且考虑到学院的方法研究所和参与esrc资助的白玫瑰DTC，他将很好地完成这项工作。指导委员会将就区域进程和在线调查的开展向我们提供建议。

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.