THE PROJECT www.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods/ Taking the Long View, based at London South Bank University, has been exploring innovative ways of overcoming ethical and practical obstacles to creating academic and non-academic access to a qualitative longitudinal (QL) dataset in the form of a ‘mini’, showcase archive. QUADS DEMONSTRATOR PROJECTS THE DATA This exploratory project was funded under the ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS), a small initiative running from April 2005 to October 2006. Co-ordinated by ESDS Qualidata at Essex, the scheme is dedicated to the mission of learning more about sharing, representation and re-use of qualitative data, in all of its disparate shape and forms. Inventing Adulthoods is a QL dataset that provides a unique window on most aspects of the lives of young people as they grew up in England and Northern Ireland at the turn of the 21st century during the decade 1996 - 2006. Aged 11-17 years in 1996 and 17-28 in 2006, the young people were growing up in in five very different areas of England and Northern Ireland spanning rural to urban. Tracing individual biographies, the study captures change over time. It combines three consecutive projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The first (school-based) study involved questionnaires (N=1800), focus groups (N=62) individual interviews (N=57), and research assignments (N=272). The other two studies followed 121 young people, largely drawn from these samples. THE WORK Prepare a showcase mini archive •develop ethical and practical criteria for selecting, cleaning, anonymising, and representing the data for ten cases •participatory methods for re-negotiating informed consent with the ten relevant young people Establish the potential for using the mini archive •consult academic and non- academic users Establish a network of dataset users •develop a network in the context of an ESRC- funded, large scale QL study beginning in February 2007 •Changing Lives and Times: Relationship and Identities Through the Life Course ('Timescapes') involves seven projects collectively studying the span of the life course •The Open University has already data for producing a course on ‘Youth’ (KE308) www.open.ac.uk/courses Disseminate project findings •web site, workshop presentations and articles THE UNFORESEENS • a practical battle with the data set: re-collating from wave to case; searching for missing tapes, field notes and files; copying missing back-up tapes then concluding that digitising would be quicker and more effective • the enormous amount of time taken by a consultative approach to informed consent • the precarious nature of the huge investment made in preparing data a consultative approach involves • the need for a project web site which serves as: multi- functional tool for promotion/marketing; cumulative storage of material; taster for the mini archive; and user consultation OVERVIEW OF CASE DATA *data not available for all cases The dataset has considerable scope for methodological and theoretical advance and potential for application to policy, practice and education. Each round of interviews is stored and coded in NUD*IST, thus facilitating cross-sectional analysis. MAKING THE LONG VIEW