The AMSR Newsletter
Every quarter we publish a fresh bulletin containing news about what’s new at the AMSR. Latest acquisitions, events, inspirational ways of using the resources, people in the news and a great deal more besides.
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Newsletter No 1 2025 (January)
Letter from the Editor
AMSR is undergoing a transition period. Adam Phillips is retiring as Chief Executive at the end of March. Richard Asquith, who has been an active Member of the Development Committee and is now its Deputy Chairman, as well as being on the Executive Committee and Trustee Board, is taking over as Chief Executive. Richard is an extremely experienced researcher. He now works as a Consultant in Media Research and has had a very impressive career, mostly with Kantar in various roles, including Global Chief Executive of Kantar Media Audiences and Managing Director of BMRB. We talked to Richard about his career and how he feels about AMSR and its place, both in the industry and the wider social world, particularly in education.
Adam is a hard act to follow. The increasing growth and success of the Archive are due, in no small measure, to his experience and enthusiasm, as well as his talent for recognising people with appropriate skills to work as volunteers for AMSR. He has given tremendous support and encouragement to disparate groups of people, bringing them together – in spite of their work in separate silos on various different tasks – in marketing, reviewing, cataloguing, editing, development, relations with agencies and academics, to name just a few of the functions which have contributed to the growth and achievements of the Archive. We shall miss him and wish him well in his ‘retirement’.
The interview with Richard is below. We welcome him and look forward to working together in sustaining the continuing growth of the Archive.
As part of the Awareness Campaign, we continue to attend relevant events and we have reports from the MRS Conferences on AI and ‘Agency Owners and Leaders’ as well as History Day, which was organised by London University Senate House Library and the Institute of Historical Research.
Phyllis Macfarlane brings us up to date with progress in the field of education, particularly schools, where we are embarking on a new marketing campaign and study guides to promote the use of the Archive among A-level students.
Phyllis also reports on the important initiative we have taken in the application of AI to Archive contents. We are very aware that this technology could have an immense effect and its use would require careful management and an inevitable call on our limited resources, but it is certainly an area that we cannot ignore, as Judith Staig stresses in her report from the MRS Conference on AI.
Tony Dent writes on the latest initiatives from Better Statistics, reminding us how important accurate statistics are to good quality research.
Phyllis Macfarlane contributes her regular witty and personal review of the latest additions to the Archive.
Finally, we carry obituaries of two people who made, in their different ways, immense contributions to the research industry, both in the UK and overseas: Mary Goodyear, an icon in the qualitative research sector and Bryan Bates who was inter alia Managing Director of BMRB and Director General of ESOMAR.
Talking to Richard Asquith
Richard Asquith is taking over as Chief Executive of AMSR when Adam Phillips retires at the end of March. Phyllis Vangelder talked to him about his pre-AMSR life and shared the enthusiasm he feels for the Archive.
We began by talking about Richard’s early days in market research. It is an impressive story, starting from an intriguing but barely noticed school career-matching computer program which identified him as a future market research analyst, followed by a degree in economics. In the early 1980s, Richard joined the research training scheme at RSGB (part of the AGB Group) in the media division, progressing to high-ranking posts at Kantar, including Managing Director of BMRB and Global Chief Executive of Kantar Media Audiences.
Richard talks warmly about his early training at RSGB. “It forced me to learn about the important principles of market research: the differences between random probability and quota sampling and how to write questionnaires. Then I progressed to presenting results and writing reports – so it was a thorough grounding. I appreciate that research has changed a lot over the years and some of those skills are less directly used nowadays, but I think that having a good understanding of the underlying principles of what you’re doing is important”. Richard stayed at RSGB for 15 years, eventually leading the company’s media division.
He joined BMRB in 1999, as a Director of the TGI consumer and media service and gained experience in syndicated research. In 2004 he was made Managing Director of BMRB, including its large and highly regarded social research division. “That again was a fantastic experience because, for the first time, I got to see how and why the government commissions research. I loved the culture of BMRB. It cared about supporting and training its people and, indeed, training clients how to use the data”.
When Kantar bought TNS in 2009, it was logical to split BMRB’s media and social research into separate divisions and Richard became Chief Executive for the enlarged Global TGI unit, followed by five years as the Chief Executive of Kantar’s huge TV and Digital audience measurement business all over the world. “Audience measurement really has become a software and data science business, but it’s also extremely political, because in many countries the government is heavily involved in television….and of course there are billions of dollars of advertising revenue resting on the figures”.
It was an exciting but incredibly demanding life. “I had always promised myself that at the age of 60 I would make a change and find a better work-life balance … and that’s what happened. I now do some paid consulting and mentoring alongside my other interests and hobbies”.
Coming to the Archive
Richard talked about joining the AMSR team. He was looking to do some volunteering where he could use his experience and skills. “I got in touch with the MRS and Debrah Harding suggested AMSR so I spoke to Adam and that’s how it began”.
Richard has been an active member of AMSR’s Development Team for the last two years. He joined the Executive Committee of AMSR in April 2024 and became a Trustee of the charity in November last year.
What does Richard think of the Archive’s achievements? “It’s phenomenal really, that this resource has been built in a relatively short space of time. The building blocks are in place with about 10,500 documents, all digitised, catalogued, indexed and freely available. We’ve a good number of academics using the Archive and we have a fabulous group of very committed volunteers.
“What has been achieved is extraordinary and enormous credit must go to Adam, obviously with a lot of help from others, but his energy has played a big part in getting us here”.
The Future
Richard identifies three priority areas for him and for the Archive in the next couple of years: (1) increasing Archive usage; (2) securing funding; and (3) maintaining the motivation of AMSR’s volunteers.
Richard believes that the foundation has been built and what must happen now is a big increase in the number and range of users. “We have a very good understanding of the research business, but much of the future growth in usage will come from academia and education which is a world we don’t know so well. We need to be established with a wider set of academics and universities and to have the Archive and its use embedded in schools’ A-level curricula. Planning is already underway for the marketing to schools programme, promoting the use of the Archive in support of A-level politics, as well as modern British history. Marketing and social media, attendance at relevant events to meet students and academics, subject guides for schoolchildren, published papers using Archive data all contribute to the growth in awareness.
“We also think that there’s potential to interest national media in using Archive content, so that’s another area for us to focus on. We have to make it as easy as possible for people to extract information from the Archive”.
Richard thinks that the recent experimentation with using AI and natural language processing can be incredibly valuable for Archive users if it simplifies the identification of relevant content for them. “We must continue to get good quality information into the Archive, so that we have greater continuity of data over time. And we have to encourage agencies to give us their current stuff, so that we build a good modern collection which, after all, will be the history for tomorrow. That’s starting to happen, but we can do more. And we shall have to work out how to incorporate more digital data in the form that agencies are now delivering to clients. Data is already coming in pre-digitised forms, whether PDFs or PowerPoint slide decks or videos, but there will come a time, when client dashboards and digital transmission of information will become so significant that we need to work out how we incorporate them into the Archive. It’s not today’s problem, but it will become an important issue. So pillar one is promoting usage and developing the content and tools for users to benefit fully from the Archive”.
The second pillar is funding. “We obviously need to have the resources to do all the things we want to do. The projects we have around marketing and AI, for instance, cost money. A remarkable job has been done so far in getting the Archive to where it is through the hard work of the volunteers and the generosity both of individuals and company donors who have provided money and resources for us. But I think for the future we have to get our funding onto a firmer footing and make a stronger case to those in the research industry that what we are doing is of value – not only to them, but to society and business in general. We are the guardians of the heritage of the research industry… so we are preserving history and creating a resource that has value. We need to demonstrate the positive impact more powerfully”.
Richard summarises the second pillar “We need to make a stronger case to the industry that what we are doing is of value and has impact and therefore secure more predictability in the money we are getting in”.
Also relevant here is AMSR’s goal of achieving accreditation by the National Archives. “A lot of impressive work is already being done to systematise our activities so that they meet industry standards and, importantly, accreditation will strengthen our case when applying for grants”.
A national asset
The third pillar is developing and retaining a motivated set of volunteers. “That’s ensuring that we are organised so that our volunteers can participate in the ways that suit them, communicating clearly about any decisions that affect them and showing how the Archive is progressing and benefiting society. We also need to find ways that encourage younger people currently working in research to join us and contribute their expertise”.
If the Archive is to fulfil its potential, Richard thinks it won’t be possible to have an Archive entirely dependent on a volunteer force. “Having a small number of paid staff will make us a more solid and secure organisation”. Richard knows that we need to think this through very carefully, communicating with the volunteers and understanding what motivates them and exploring with them where there are aspects of the organisation that could become vulnerable because we don’t have enough volunteers who can commit more time.
Richard sums up his ambitions for AMSR: “I really believe that repurposing research which no longer has commercial value so that it can be used by academics and educators is a fantastic concept and I hope I find a way of working in the organisation that suits it and motivates people to strive for even greater success. We have a great set of achievements to work from and I am very excited about the possibilities for building the Archive into a significant national asset”.
AMSR goes to Events
MRS Conference: AI: Powering Up Insights 2025
23rd January 2025
Judith Staig reports
What was the AMSR doing at a conference about AI?
It might seem strange that the AMSR should choose the recent MRS conference, Powering Up Insights, devoted to all things AI, as a good place to promote the Archive. After all, AI is about the future and AMSR deals with the past.
But today is tomorrow’s history. Whenever we try to make sense of what is happening in the word, we look instinctively to the past. If we compare the introduction of Gen AI to the industrial revolution, say, or to the advent of the internet we can think more clearly about what the impact might be.
Doing so gives us confidence that the humans replaced by technology will find new roles, and that the tech will enable new skills and create opportunities, but it also helps us understand that it is likely to be painful for some, and for some time, while we make that adjustment.
The conference was packed with researchers working at the coal face learning how to use AI day to day as well as with research leaders trying to figure out strategies for their companies. And the mood was broadly optimistic; although AI will change our sector beyond recognition, a common theme was that human researchers will (always) have an important part to play. Another consistent theme was that this is still early days, and we can’t know where we are heading – but that resistance is futile.
The sheer range and variety of use cases presented for AI, from ideation and innovation through synthetic respondents and empathetic chat bots served to show the imagination and drive with which researchers are embracing AI and using it to help clients make better decisions, which is what we have always done. Some of the most interesting sessions were the panel discussions: one on the role of synthetic data and another – Qualitative conversation or conversational quant? – on the impact of AI on the essence of qual. Another standout session presented research with Gen Z using chatbots that had been trained to be empathetic.
Despite our focus on making history, we had some great conversations with delegates and it is clear that the
Archive can play a part. Not only are we exploring how AI can help with search, as Phyllis reports below, but we can provide a perspective on technology adoption from the past. And with one of the main requirements for successful AI being that tools are trained with great data, there may be opportunities to use our collections to help train AI tools and bring the perspective of history to the decisions of the future.
MRS Agency Owners and Leaders Conference
21st November 2024
Paul Edwards reports
21 November saw leading lights of the Market Research industry descend on Central London to share experience and to create a peer group for mutual support. The MRS kindly allowed the Archive of Market and Social Research to attend to help us spread the word and to canvass for donations of material to be preserved and made available in the Archive.
The Conference was chaired by James Endersby, Chairman of the MRS and Chief Executive of Opinium, and almost 100 agency leaders gathered under the cooperative theme of ‘you grow, I grow’. There was a series of panel sessions and table discussions covering a wide range of themes relevant to agency leadership. The high turnout shows the real need for the agency world to get together to consider the future of the industry. Only with strong commercial entities will the industry continue to innovate and provide the vital link between real people and the businesses and organisations that seek to serve them.
As well as the big themes of mutual support and the need to promote the industry confidently, there was wide sharing of very practical advice. Topics included: building diverse teams and keeping them motivated; navigating the new world of hybrid working; managing clients and understanding how to satisfy and retain them; and avoid thinking that investment in the future is a cost to be avoided. We got the sense of cautious optimism, but not without awareness of difficulties ahead.
For AMSR it was a great chance to meet old friends and make new ones and to spread the word that by making our Archive material available for free to Schools and Universities we were playing our small part in showing the importance of research and helping to motivate and recruit the next generation into our industry.
The MRS is planning further Leaders’ Forum sessions for 2025.
Special thanks to Danny Sims of DJS Research who generously helped with this article.
History Day
5th November 2024
Phyllis Vangelder reports
For the second year running, volunteers from AMSR attended the annual History Day, held on 5 November 2024 at London University’s Senate House. Organised by Senate House Library and the Institute of Historical Research, History Day is an opportunity for students, researchers, historians and archivists to explore library, museum, archive and history collections across the UK and beyond. Professor Claire Langhamer, who as Director of the Institute of Historical Research, is heavily involved in History Day, is a member of AMSR’s Trustee Board and certainly recommends that we attend again this year.
The 2024 Event did not seem to have the same footfall of undergraduates reading modern history as the previous year, but it was heavily attended by historians and archivists, and there was a good buzz of interest and energy throughout the day. It was certainly a worthwhile experience for AMSR. Many of the young people we spoke to had no previous knowledge of the Archive and were very excited to discover how easily it could be accessed. We had a very impressive stand, (good banners and a smart signature tablecloth), and the team of volunteers – Judith Wardle, Phyllis Vangelder, Joe Moran, Paul Edwards – chatted throughout the day to the participants. Joe Moran was especially effective, demonstrating to individual researchers, how they could access the contents of the Archive on their phones. They could not believe how much material they could get so freely and easily to help with their research.
In addition to the students and postgraduates who came to the AMSR stand, a flow of archivists from the other stands visited us and of course we explored their offerings. Many were from local Councils and university, art and museum libraries or special interests (e.g. the armed forces, horticultural, zoos) throughout the country, or focused on different periods of history, so not directly associated with our period. (We are inclined to forget that whereas we think of ‘modern’ as post-WW2, ‘modern’ in history terms encapsulates a much longer period). In the crowded fair, spread across four halls, we came across fascinating Archives such as the Centre for the History of People, Places and Community and the Library Hub Discover. And of course there were several old friends: organisations which are analogous to our own. it was great to re-engage with Mass Observation, with whom we are planning another webinar, and the Churchill Archive which houses the Mark Abrams Collection. Churchill produce very good dissertation research guides to their collections and their guide to the Mark Abrams Collection, under the heading of social research and observation, highlights his important surveys. A separate guide to race and immigration research includes surveys conducted under his leadership which focused on this area.
History Day is contributing to the growing awareness of our work among historians and archivists in providing an invaluable source of information for researchers. We are steadily becoming a part of the Archive community, and this is underpinned by our presence at this important Event.
Schools project
Phyllis Macfarlane describes what is happening with AMSR’s Schools Project: Inspiring stories and fascinating facts
In the last Newsletter I described the curated material we are developing for Schools, and we continue to work on that. The next stage is to improve the website so that teachers and pupils are taken quickly to areas of direct relevance to them and can find what they require easily. And our Marketing team is doing that. Phyllis Vangelder and I are building a library of articles that are relevant to A-Level pupils and which we hope will make them think of how they might use the Archive for their studies. We are calling it ‘Inspiring stories’ and are including slightly more academic writings –including articles from our books such as from Book 2: How we’ve changed: social trends from post-war to present day and beyond. The Chapter ‘From Sunday Roast to Poke Bowl’ tells how eating habits have changed and compares the perfect meal of 1947 with that of 1968. Or from Book 3: Researching the public: post-war policy, politics, and polling, the Chapter on ‘The Great Inflation’ tells how women coped with 25% inflation in 1974, and the longer-term effects of inflation on women and society.
Our Marketing Team have also reminded us that school children, even 17–18-year-olds, need to be entertained and intrigued by details from the past to stimulate their interest in accessing the Archive, and have suggested that we write up ‘Fascinating facts’ from the Archive to make children realise that the world was different 50 years ago. This should be relatively easy. For example – did you realise that 12% of homes had a caged bird as a pet in 1970, and what do you think the name of those birds was? The majority of birds were called Joey! Less than half of all homes had a washing machine in 1971, and they were mostly Twin-tub or Top-loading, not Automatic. We need a mix of fun and serious facts: such as three things you didn’t know about Mrs Thatcher, perhaps. And we will get someone of the right age to tell us what actually is fascinating to 17/18-year-olds (and not just to us). If we get enough we might even produce a calendar!
AI for the Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane reports on the first steps
It’s obvious that we should be thinking about how we can use AI to improve the search facility in our Archive. However, it’s not at all obvious how AI will work with our specific content because we have such an eclectic selection of documents: from the fully quantitative, like the TGI tables; to Opinion Poll Newsletters like the MORI BPO and NOP Bulletin reports, which are a mix of commentary and all types and formats of tables, to fully qualitative reports like the CRAM Collection. And documents in different formats from all periods of time.
Our Sponsor, Ovation MR, kindly offered us the system that they are developing for their own work (Qualibee), and we have been trying it out on various queries. We are finding that it is very effective on more complex questions like ‘Attitudes to testing cosmetics on animals’ where the resource was mainly qualitative – like the CRAM Reports – and where the topic is not the main objective of the research, but more of a peripheral outcome of it.
But it was less helpful on ‘Attitudes to American Presidents’ where the resource was mainly opinion polls and a mix of different table formats and commentary. And also, we need to work out how to align the results from the OCLC search with those from the Qualibee search, to make the operation more seamless for the user, otherwise it can be very confusing to navigate the results. But overall we certainly found added value for the more complex queries, over and above the OCLC search function, and we are confident that with more work we will be able to incorporate AI into the Archive to the benefit of all users. Watch this space!
Better Statistics
Tony Dent, Director Better Statistics CIC, looks at the past year
2024 began with speculation as to when the Lievesley report on the Future of UKSA would be published. In the event it was issued on the 12 March 2024. The report was less critical of UKSA’s performance than we had expected, although it had provided many useful recommendations, including the important suggestion that UKSA should appoint a methodologist at a senior level.
Possibly the most surprising observation in Professor Lievesley’s report is the assertion that the Office of Statistics Regulation (OSR) operates entirely independently of the National Statistician. This is contrary to the structure defined by the Statistics Act of 2007 which had originally established UKSA, and had not previously been understood to be the case by BSC or many other observers. However, we are assured that the fact that the National Statistician is not a member of the Regulation Committee ensures that the OSR’s regulatory functions are maintained independently of the production function and Sir Robert Chote has confirmed that, should there be any dispute between the OSR and any production function, then the Chair will support the OSR.
Better Statistics have long believed that improving the quality and reliability of our statistics, both public and private, requires improvement in our regulatory environment and much of the last year has been devoted to providing input to the following public reviews and consultations as provided by the OSR.
Inflation matters Throughout the year we have been suggesting that it is time for the OSR to reconsider the accreditation of CPIH formally. Our Seminar held on 2 May 2 ‘Inflation 2024 – Are we using the right measures?’ highlighted a number of weaknesses which were further elaborated in the OSR’s assessment of the Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR). We have now formally requested that both the macro-economic measures CPI and CPIH should be re-assessed because of their use of past rental data to estimate changes in current mortgage prices, and we have suggested that it is time to reconsider the status of the RPI, particularly given its continued status as the inflation measure in the public mind.
CIS follow-on surveys Readers may be aware of the concerns BSC had previously expressed concerning the use of a Bayesian Regression Model for estimating the incidence of the Covid-19 virus within the population of England and Wales from 2020 through to 2023. In the event, the original CIS sample and survey design have remained in use for the Winter Covid-19 Infection Survey (during the winter of 2023/24) and for subsequent health studies. including the GP Access study published in April 2024. BSC have expressed our concerns with the quality of these follow up studies to the OSR because of the failure to include any replacement sample; they are therefore only based upon the original sample recruited for the Covid-19 survey in 2020. Moreover, the results now exclude data from any original participant unable to complete online surveys and, finally, the response is likely to have been affected by the removal of the incentive previously provided to CIS participants. This, of course, also ignores any ‘conditioning bias’ which used to be of such concern to those running longitudinal panels some years ago. In the opinion of BSC the bias(es) introduced by these changes are inadequately considered by the Quality & Methods Information (QMI) provided for the study, which states: “The GP Access Survey sample is subject to possible bias, especially because the survey population is a subset of the Winter CIS population” and “This will exclude a small proportion of the population (around 6% of households had no internet access as at March 2021) but is unlikely to have a large impact on the estimates produced” .
3rd Assessment of the 2021 Census BSC were also pleased to have been invited to contribute to the third stage of the OSR’s assessment of the 2021 Census for England and Wales. This assessment focuses on how well the Statistics output by the 2021 Census have met user needs and the OSR remain open to further comments, although the feedback questionnaire has now closed. Our submission included the suggestion that the ONS should publish more detail of the responses received by local area; the QMI for the Census makes it clear that response varied significantly by area, and for some local areas, the Census returns had been supplemented by local administrative data to enable the final estimates of the local population and its characteristics. We believe that the details of the process employed should be published for each administrative area to help the interpretation of results in every case. Our submission had also questioned the Census results on gender identity; however, these have now been formally reviewed by the ONS and are now categorised as ‘statistics under development’. This seems to BSC to be a fudge to avoid the conclusion that a specific error was made in framing this question, which was evidently inadequately tested.
Systemic Review of Economic Statistics Our most recent contribution to the OSR’s reviews has been concern with the UK’s Economic Statistics, with the objective to identify any systemic issues. Aside from falling response rates, which is certainly a systemic matter (and one we have offered some advice on), we primarily consider there is a systematic failure to involve the commercial sector in providing solutions to any of the difficulties UKSA faces. UKSA seems never to look beyond the comfort provided by ‘academic researchers working within a secure environment’, as if those engaged in commerce are not also bound by the same legal requirements as civil servants and, possibly, they may be more experienced than many academics. Anyway, we provided some examples of commercial initiatives which we believe are worth investigating further, most notably a document on measuring productivity at firm level which has also been sent to John Van Reenan, Chaiman of the Chancellor’s new Economic Council. Use of the word ‘systemic’ also provided the opportunity to evidence some of the systemic weaknesses of the OSR website, particularly the search function, which remains as inadequate as it was four years ago.
We believe that the above examples are sufficient to illustrate that the malaise within UKSA is significantly more extensive than the headline difficulties illustrated by the problems with the Labour Force Survey and corresponding Labour Market Data. The problems are also more extensive than was revealed in the Lievesley report and they strengthen the suggestion to appoint a methodologist to oversee work. This seems particularly important as more use is made of administrative data with the growth of substituting modelled data for measurement.
Better Statistics also believe that the Code of Practice should be extended and that the OSR should have more ‘teeth’ to ensure that the Code is adhered to. In particular we propose that the Code should be extended to incorporate some specific good practice guidelines such as:
- Each survey report as provided by the ONS should have a clear statement of the objectives of the work.
- Every study should have a mandatory comment on non-response, breaking it down into various sub-categories both by standard demographics and, if appropriate, other important variables such as area. For important studies, a sample of non-respondents should always be followed up.
- There should be better guidelines employed for measuring confidence intervals, many of which are presently inaccurate. The OSR should encourage the use of the coefficient of variation as a means of standardising confidence intervals to improve understanding the variation implicit in various levels of the data.
- Every QMI should comment on the possibility of bias in the results and what steps, if any, have been taken to measure/adjust for it.
Further we believe that the OSR should take responsibility for the consultations by any part of UKSA. Presently the standards employed for consultations are lamentable, with the following flaws almost universal:
- Bias in the formulation and selection of the questions.
- A lack of simple measurement questions thus ensuing no clear statistical results. Rather almost all responses are required to be open-ended with the possibility of further bias with the analysis. (I would suggest that for each separate topic included in a consultation the first question might measure the degree of interest in the topic and then comments should be requested).
- Above all – questionnaires that don’t actually work properly.
As a minimum OSR should have the responsibility to check a consultation before it is published and assure themselves that it is designed to reflect user preferences and that it will be appropriately signposted to interested parties.
In short, we are suggesting that there needs to be a very significant improvement in the standards to be applied by UKSA in the production of their work. We are conscious, however, that many of the methods which UKSA use reflect the practice used for much commercial work nowadays, in particular the use of self-selecting samples inherent with online data collection is almost universal, including for opinion polls. The important difference is that although important, most opinion polls and other commercial work are not used for important policy decisions and the unreliability of the results is relatively unimportant. Nevertheless, BSC would also like to see more attention paid to the quality of commercial work as well as with UKSA projects. Hopefully there will be widespread support for the “Integrity in Practice” joint MRS/OSR/BSC webinar now scheduled for Tuesday 23 April 2025. Meanwhile if anyone has any comments on UKSA’s Code of Practice the consultation remains open until 12 February.
Finally, the first UK Statistics Assembly took place on Wednesday 22 January 2025. Formed in response to a recommendation in the Independent Review of the UK Statistics Authority, the Assembly was a unique opportunity to discuss and advise on the statistical and data priorities for the UK. Hopefully the assembly will provide some impetus for improved performance in future.
A report of the Assembly will be in the next issue of the AMSR Newsletter.
Latest Additions to the Archive
From Alan’s Attic: Predicting the Future of Research
I am fascinated by the fact that human beings in general, including market researchers, are generally very poor at predicting the future, and therefore I love to read commentaries on the state of a specific topic (industry, sector, science or whatever) at a particular point in time, with reflections on its historic development and predictions for the future. I like then to try and see where things went wrong with the predictions, and what can be learnt. For example, in the 1960s people thought that one of the reasons that previous economic forecasts of the future had gone wrong was because they didn’t have good demographic data on trends in the overall population – but they thought that this would be remedied going forward, since such tracking services were being developed from the 1950s. But at the time, of course, they didn’t appreciate the importance and effect on the future of emotional data, because in the 1960s most serious commentators believed that everything could be explained scientifically and rationally, and that emotions didn’t matter. And so it goes – each stage only takes you one small step forward. You can try and make allowances for the ‘known unknowns’, but there are always the ‘unknown unknowns’, to come and bite you. Not to mention Harold Macmillan’s ‘Events, my dear boy, events’.
This article from Alan Hedges on the Future of Market Research, dated November 1970, is therefore a real cracker from my point of view: Market research’s future – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive
I mean, I was just about started in 1970 and I personally thought we market researchers were in a ‘glorious’ state: there was telephone research to invent; international research to develop; the new mass business market to measure; and new technology to use. Everything to play for. But Alan, in the more mature consumer market (and obviously much more experienced), starts by saying that: “A decade ago it seemed likely that the newly emergent discipline of marketing backed by the science of market research and the growing power of the mighty computer would almost remove the risk and uncertainty of business”.
But he already sees and deplores the trend towards, first, ‘fail-safe thinking’. (He observes, borrowing David Ogilvy’s familiar analogy, that research is often used ’like a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination’). And, secondly, towards ‘short-term thinking’ which he believes inhibits the proper strategic use of research capabilities. He then basically argues very cogently for the development of what we now know as the ‘Insight’ industry.
He was certainly ahead of his time – and the ‘Insight industry’ as he envisaged it has definitely emerged – but still, from my observation, the prevalence of ‘fail-safe’ and ‘short-term’ thinking seems even greater amongst clients now than it was 50+ years ago. ‘Insight’, it seems, has failed to persuade clients to think either more long-term or more strategically. I would argue that it is the failure more to understand economics and attitudes to risk than a failure of research or insight… but do read the paper and marvel at its prescience.
Research as a recording of ‘everyday life’: how we spend our time; does advertising work?; little old ladies and boxes of chocolate
Time Budgets: Another report from Alan’s attic for those interested in the history of ‘everyday’ life (and many people are): Time budgets (how people spend their time) – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive, B M Hedges, SCPR. This is a paper discussing Time Budget studies, their history, methods and applications, from the mid- ‘70s, and includes examples and references of value to the modern historian.
How Advertising influences Sales: A refreshingly honest short speech of John Treasure’s from 1967 in which he basically admits that no-one knows the answer: there are some theories, but ‘it’s complicated’. They’re pretty sure that advertising does influence sales, but certainly not always. In short: they are working on it. How advertising influences sales (script of a talk to London Branch, Institute of Marketing meeting February 23, 1967) – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive
Guinness: We have many reports on Guinness advertising (they must have spent such a lot over the years!) and they offer very specific insights into culture at the time. It is difficult to imagine now that ‘Guinness is good for you’ was literally seen as a fact post-WW2. Guinness ran an advertising campaign in the 1920s which stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint. The slogan was created by Dorothy L. Sayers, no less.
In fact, the first-ever Guinness advertising from that time waxed lyrical about the brew’s numerous health benefits: “Guinness builds strong muscles. It feeds exhausted nerves. It enriches the blood. Doctors affirm that Guinness is a valuable restorative after influenza and other weakening illnesses. Guinness is a valuable natural aid in cases of insomnia”.
However, this focus on the health benefits created a problem for them when marketing to women throughout the 1970s. By then they wanted Guiness to be seen as a drink enjoyed by socially poised, active, healthy women. But, in reality, because of this pre-war legacy image, it still reminded many women of the reality and drudgery of being a housewife – with the danger of the brand being even more firmly based in the traditional restorative and medicinal (ie health) motivations synonymous with the ‘little old lady’. It took them a long time to change this view. Most of the decade, in fact! Preliminary advertising recommendations 1977-78: a discussion document – Proposals and tenders – The AMSR Online Archive
Assortment Attitude Survey (Chocolate and Candy): This is a 1965 study done for Mackintosh by Interscan. Content from the ‘60s is especially interesting and valuable because we have comparatively little of it, and this is very much a classic: A detailed quota sample based on a PPS selection of sample points; sample size 1299 of which 876 were assortment users (buyers and/or eaters). An ‘assortment’ being a box of mixed chocolates and candies. Like the Guinness study mentioned above, it really gives you a picture of a part of everyday life that you really wouldn’t find elsewhere. And it’s real – not fiction. I think the thing that astonishes me about early chocolate research is how much chocolate people used to eat. I’ve always had the perception that consumption was somehow quite restrained in earlier decades – more of a ‘once-in-a-while treat’ than every day. But if it was more restrained consumption – then certainly it wasn’t low. High proportions of the sample buy assortment boxes once a week. It’s a little hard to tell because this is a preliminary report and in 1965 cross-tab facilities were a little basic (to say the least) – so there aren’t quite as many unweighted bases as I would like, but nevertheless – consumption is pretty high. And the prices are relatively low by today’s standards : only 3/10 for a box of Milk Tray, 3/- for a box of Roses. But then disposable incomes were much lower in the 1960s. Assortment attitude survey: preliminary report (chocolate and candy) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive
Media Research: Negotiating a minefield. A donation from Roger Gane
Talking about predicting the future: there is a point in this collection where Roger declines to make any ‘prediction which may come back to haunt me’. This was a very wise move given the ‘minefield’ that was media research in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
This collection demonstrates how quickly markets can change over time; how rightly or wrongly the research industry anticipated them, and what a roller-coaster media (particularly audience measurement) research has been, has had to be, over the past few decades. These papers give you a real view of how it was to be in the thick of it.
1. The London Project. April 1977. For Thames Television Ltd by RSGB
A fabulous study for those interested in London in the ’70s, even if not particularly interested in the media. It relates to the Future of London which is seen to be in decline – in particular the Inner City. It is basically a quantitative study looking at general satisfaction amongst Londoners in three areas: Inner City, GLC Suburbs and London Fringe.
Overall Satisfaction is seen to be pretty high. The Very Satisfied comprise 32% in the Inner City, 36% in the Suburbs and 40 % in the London Fringe. Least Satisfaction is reported amongst lower Income levels (£3,100 – £5,199 pa) where only 26% are Very Satisfied. Highest Satisfaction is found amongst the Upper Middle class (AB’s) where 47% claim to be Very Satisfied. Now there’s a surprise… The London Project (the future of London): commentary April 1977 – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive2. Extract from JMRS October 1972: Costs and Pricing in MR.
2. An interesting review from 1972, covering five contributions from different perspectives:
· A Survey of Agency costings: Roger Gane and Nigel Spackman
· A Research Agency view: Donald Monk
· A Specialist Agency view: John Goodyear
· Research Buyer View: Bryan Hughes, Shellmex & BP)
· Costs and Pricing Conclusions: Richard Roberts Miller, Frank Teer
Journal of the Market Research Society vol 14 no. 4 October – The MRS Journal – The AMSR Online Archive
3. Video Recorders : Present and Future – Implications for the TV audience, March 1988, Roger Gane, AGB International.
Video Recorder penetration has been increasing through the1980s and become an important and complicating part of the TV audience scene with implications for all sectors of the industry, including researchers. Video recorders: present and future implications for the television audience – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
4. The New Satellite Channel: Implications for Audience Research in the UK, October 1988, Roger Gane, AGB TV International.
A great deal has been promised but not a lot delivered. This paper covers: Monitoring and representation of the satellite audience; Possible implication for audience levels; and audience reporting requirements. AGB are looking forward to future challenges! The new satellite channels: implications for (television) audience research in the UK – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
5. The Peoplemeter – does it have a role in the1990s? c1989. Roger Gane, AGB Television International.
Peoplemeters have become established during the1980s as a reliable currency – but there are doubts about their future relevance. What should we expect by the end of the 1990s? This paper covers: a) Audience Category reporting – and the panel size/cost equation, b) Increasing the data yield – without killing the panel, and c) Improvement in the basic measurement – what will passive systems offer? The Peoplemeter: does it have a role in the 1990s? – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
The conclusion? They are only ‘at the end of the beginning’!
6. Are Peoplemeters providing a standard measure of the European Audience? May 1990, Roger Gane AGB Television Ltd.
A description of a) the Peoplemeter measurement itself, b) the overall research operation, and c) the available information. The conclusion though is ‘No’: the author is pretty certain that a standard measure is not being obtained. Are Peoplemeters providing a standard measure of the European audience? – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
7. Harmonisation of Disharmony: Regulation or Restriction, First ASI* TV Symposium, November 1991, Roger Gane, AGB Television International.
Covers agenda of Symposium and Roger Gane’s Paper on progress on the harmonisation of Peoplemeters – it’s complicated! Harmonisation or disharmony? Regulation or restriction? (International harmonisation of television audience measurement systems) – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
8. Worldwide Development of Peoplemeters: Second ASI* TV Symposium. November 1992. Roger Gane.
Covers the spread of Peoplemeters worldwide and possible areas and options for development. The worldwide development of Peoplemeters – BBC UK and Global Audience Research – The AMSR Online Archive
*Advertising Seminars International
9. Radio’s new Audience Research Service: RAJAR. Admap. November 1992, Roger Gane, RAJAR.
An overview of RAJAR plus other relevant papers.
This collection is invaluable to those studying the development of the media/audience measurement industry from the early ‘70s to the early ’90s, and it builds the coverage in the Archive very well. Altogether it shows that we market researchers were good at responding to changes in consumption behaviours. We are innovative and quick to react with new approaches and methodologies, but then perhaps we were slow to persuade clients to accept what it all meant for them. Probably again because they were only really interested in the short term – because new measurement systems were mainly bad news for the larger clients. The new methods picked up on audiences of smaller stations and therefore tended to reduce the measured market share of the larger. But the clients would have been better accepting the facts, learning from the results and planning for the future accordingly.
It reminds me of the US and European car manufacturers in the 1970s, who didn’t want to believe that customer satisfaction with Japanese manufactured cars was so much higher than satisfaction with ‘their’ cars. They spent a lot of time inventing all sorts of explanations – mainly looking for faults in the research sampling process – rather than addressing the obvious – which was that the Japanese manufactured cars did have many fewer faults, and therefore did warrant higher levels of customer satisfaction.
All the above demonstrates the power of the Archive to help us learn from history and its value as history. Do look in your ‘attics’ and donate your content. It really is priceless.
Obituaries: Mary Goodyear, Bryan Bates
Mary Goodyear died in September 2024, aged 81.
She was one of the industry’s most distinguished practitioners of qualitative market research, known for her insightful papers both in print and at seminars and conferences throughout the world, as well as for her wit and charm. She loved doing international research, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, and was the first woman to be President of ESOMAR. (I was delighted when, as President, she asked me to edit ESOMAR’s NewsBrief enabling me to have a wonderful new focus on international research).
She was Chairman and Chief Executive of Market Behaviour Ltd which she and her husband John set up in the early ‘60s. Mary and John made a formidable pair, attracting blue-chip clients in the commercial and public sectors. Mary believed passionately in the contribution of well-conducted market research to marketing and business generally and was a pioneer in advocating the value of qualitative research. As a psychologist, she knew and understood how people’s conscious and unconscious attitudes and views affected their behaviour and she was a leading light in the growth of the qualitative sector in the UK. She played an important role, with other qualitative researchers, in its increasing success, in the face of some hostility from traditional ‘quants’ . The controversy between quantitative or quantitative research now seems antiquated when qualitative research is an accepted part of the research contribution. But at the time it was a hot topic – leading to a long correspondence in the MRS Newsletter, with people actually taking sides.
Mary’s mission was not to see market research as a box-ticking exercise, but to get as close as possible to respondents. Her mantra was to ask the right questions, to the right people in the right way, whether in a hall, a kitchen, a pub, or a market stall in Africa. Being close to the people you interview and being in their environment, brings you closer to the data. She did pioneering work examining the evolution of the consumer and its relationship with the evolution of marketing. This was particularly important in international research, when each country is in a different stage of marketing development. In an iconic paper she identified six stages in the evolution of marketing. Decisions, she believed, should be made in the context of marketing.
Although the growth of qualitative research owed a great deal to the establishment of planning departments in advertising agencies, Mary eschewed advertising, feeling it was insufficiently thoughtful and academic. “Motivational researchers want to understand rather than to sell”, she said in her oral history interview. She was rigorous in ensuring that the people who worked at MBL were trained to listen critically and understand the questions they asked and the respondents they interviewed. Quality depended on using tried and trusted procedures, in other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology as well as market research. She was an intellectual who had studied logic and philosophy as well as psychology and she trained her staff to have intellectual vigour, listening intently to the tapes of their interviews and group discussions, analysing them with scientific rigour and getting the conversations in their heads, so that patterns emerged. This close attention to respondents’ words and language were an essential component in creating hypotheses. Obedience to the data was an important part of Mary’s philosophy of research.
Mary Goodyear was born in March 1943. She attended Brockenhnust Grammar School and read Psychology at University College, London. In 1965 she and her husband John founded Market Behaviour Ltd (MBL). MBL was sold to NFO in 1997 and she and John retired to Guernsey in 2000. She died in September 2024 aged 81. John pre-deceased her in 2019.
The Archive has a good collection of papers by Mary Goodyear.
Her interview in the Oral Histories series is on the AMSR website.
There will be a celebration of Mary’s life and work on 12 March, on what would have been her 82nd birthday. It will be held at the Lansdowne Club, 5.30 to 9.30 pm. Please contact her niece Helen if you would like to attend: helen.thetrevaskis@gmail.com
Bryan Bates died earlier this month aged 93.
He had been a very active member of AMSR since its inception, serving as Chairman of the Contents Committee until sadly he had to retire due to ill health. He worked unsparingly to increase the contents of the Archive and was often to be found in the ‘engine room’ in Harrow, which Ipsos kindly provided for the Archive’s scanning operation, packing up books and reports to go to HAT. He encouraged his many friends and colleagues in the industry to donate material to the Archive and, under his Chairmanship, the collections increased exponentially.
Bryan had a distinguished career in market research. He was Managing Director of BMRB from 1976 and a Director of its associated companies overseas: EMRB and EMARBI. He was a Director of MORI from 1984.
He was elected Chairman of the MRS in 1975, having served on its Council and been Chairman of its Meetings Committee responsible for a very successful Conference in 1973.
Bryan was a founding Patron of the Market Research Benevolent Fund, alongside Gerald Goodhardt and Jennifer Bowen, when the MRBA was founded in 1977 to help people in the industry, particularly fieldworkers, when they were in financial or emotional trouble. He became Chairman of MFRBA and worked ceaselessly to support researchers in every part of the industry, whatever their level – Managing Directors, fieldworkers or coders. All remember his sympathetic concern.
Bryan had been involved with ESOMAR for several years, serving as its President from 1986 to 1988. The management structure of the organisation was strengthened as its range of activities increased with the coming of the Common Market. ESOMAR moved to becoming truly international, rather than simply European. Bryan was offered the newly created post of Director General in ESOMAR’s Amsterdam office, taking up the post in 1991.
Several important books and reports were published under his leadership including Freedom to Publish Opinion Poll Results and a profile of ESOMAR’s Founding Fathers, as well as continuous studies of the industry, and audience measurement. He also commissioned Colin McDonald and Phyllis Vangelder to edit the 4th Edition of the ESOMAR Handbook of Market and Opinion Research.
Bryan Bates was born in March 1931. Following school at Wallington Grammar School, he attended the London School of Economics. He died in January 2025 aged 93, following several years in care, after ill health caused him to retire from AMSR.
Newsletter No. 4, October 2024
Letter from the Editor
I have recently been introduced to the acronym TOFT – Too Old For Technology and thought I fitted nicely into this segment. However, I have been blown away by an experience with AI that I found quite astonishing. I have been speaking to leaders in the industry as part of AMSR’s Awareness Campaign and I recently had a great conversation with Kelly Beaver, MBE, Chief Executive of Ipsos UK and Ireland. She suggested that we put our conversation into Ipsos Facto, the company’s proprietary AI capability. She instructed the program to focus on certain elements in our interview – on the role of AMSR, why it is great, the impact it has and its relevance to the industry. She also asked it to pick out any comments about what Ipsos can do for the Archive and what AMSR can do for Ipsos, as well as asking for personal reflections and personalities to come through in the interview summary. The result is below in the Kelly Beaver Interview. Of course, we both made a few tweaks and added some additional material, but the essence of the conversation has been AI- generated.
As Adam Phillips points out in his review of the ESOMAR Congress, AI is very top-of-mind throughout the sector. When I spoke to Ben Page last year, he stressed that AI would have a tremendous impact on the industry – we have to engage with a new source of data. And Kelly Beaver, at the MRS Conference earlier this year, pointed out, “We need to adapt to the way the research role is changing. All roles can be enhanced in some ways by AI. It is every researcher’s job to figure out what that is and make sure they are AI-enabled for the future”. The possibilities for AI-generated research are endless, from transcripts of qualitative groups to questionnaire design and analysis. It will not negate human involvement, nor creativity, but it will transform and help our industry.
Maybe I’m not a TOFT after all!
We are establishing excellent relationships with the academic sector and we are very pleased to publish two articles, from academia, one from Alex Langstaff, a historian and lecturer, based at New York University, whose research is on the history of sample survey research, and one by Alice Naylor, a AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Researcher with the University of Portsmouth and the Science Museum Group. She has already contributed an article in Book 2 in our series on ‘Showcasing the Archive’, on ‘Women art home’ and is fervent in her appreciation of the Archive.
Importantly in this issue Phyllis Macfarlane reports on our ambitious Schools programme, helping A-level students by building curated collections from the Archive for training material.
As part of our ‘Awareness campaign’ AMSR volunteers are trying to attend appropriate events and we have had a presence at, inter al, the ESOMAR Congress, the MRS Seminar on Business- to- Business Research and this year’s History Day.
Tony Dent discusses some of the latest issues concerning Better Statistics and as usual Phyllis Macfarlane contributes her thoughtful and lively review some of the New Additions to the Archive.
Sadly we also have an obituary of John Barter who contributed so much to the market research world.
From teenage bedrooms to boardrooms: Talking to Kelly Beaver
In a wide-ranging conversation Phyllis Vangelder recently talked to Kelly Beaver, MBE, Chief Executive of Ipsos in the UK & Ireland. At the end of the conversation, Kelly suggested that they put the conversation into the company’s proprietary AI capability. She instructed the program to focus on certain elements in the interview – on the role of AMSR, why it is great, the impact it has and its relevance to the industry. She also asked it to pick out any comments about what Ipsos can do for the Archive and what AMSR can do for Ipsos, as well as asking for personal reflections and personalities to come through in the interview summary. The result is below in the Kelly Beaver Interview. Of course, both Kelly and Phyllis made a few tweaks and added some additional material, but the essence of the conversation has been AI- generated from the interview tape.
I was delighted to catch up with Kelly – the conversation highlighted her passion for the industry and its future and she spoke very candidly about her experiences in managing a huge company, leading a very effective public life both in the sector and on the media, as well as navigating motherhood.
She says, “People ask me if I have a work/life balance. I would probably say, no, but I do have a work/life harmony (most of the time)! What we want from our people is for them to create a work/life harmony for themselves. Sometimes they will be leaning more into work, sometimes they are going to have to lean in more to family. I know there are different phases in people’s lives and you have to allow them flexibility to build the harmony that works for them”.
Kelly does not micromanage. She is surrounded by a highly experienced team whom she trusts. She champions flexible working policies, but she points out that these are not policies explicitly for men and women in the workplace, but for people.
Kelly’s enthusiasm for the AMSR is palpable. She sees the Archive as a vital part of the market research ecosystem, preserving the industry’s rich history and offering invaluable insights into societal and consumer trends over time.
This concept of heritage resonated throughout the conversation. Kelly emphasised the importance of understanding the past to contextualise the present and inform future research endeavours. She highlighted how AMSR’s collection allows researchers to trace the evolution of products, services, and consumer behaviour, providing a depth of understanding that contemporary data alone cannot offer.
Recalling her visit to the Archive ‘engine room’ (generously provided by Ipsos in its Harrow office) Kelly says, “I was on the floor with my shoes off, surrounded by all those wonderful pieces from Sir Robert’s Worcester’s castle, in that little room in Harrow and I came across this piece about what teenagers do in their bedrooms. It was one of these polls that was done back in the 1980s, and I thought, this is amazing! I immediately sent it to our teams and suggested we should replicate the study in the present day to demonstrate the power of the Archive to inspire new research and provide a fascinating comparative lens. Another find, when I was sitting on the floor, were reports from the Nestlé Family Studies. Nestlé was funding these massive studies about how families were living their lives in Britain, as part of its understanding of the UK marketplace”.
The conversation also touched upon the challenges of capturing data on emerging trends and demographics, particularly Generation Alpha. Kelly acknowledged the lack of data on this young cohort and stressed the need to start gathering information on how to ensure that the industry can understand and engage with them effectively in the future.
Kelly’s commitment to supporting the AMSR extends beyond mere words. As well as providing the Archive with physical space, Ipsos encourages its employees to volunteer their time and expertise. Kelly also proposed several exciting collaborative initiatives that other supporters could replicate in their organisation. These include:
- Raising awareness of the AMSR among Ipsos employees: with presentations, workshops, and internal communications
- Integrating the AMSR into training programmes to demonstrate the value of historical data and provide employees with the skills to utilise AMSR’s resources effectively.
- Collaborating on research projects that leverage the Archive’s unique data sets, such as replicating historical studies or exploring long-term trends
- Taking part in company awareness programmes – potentially with interviews with the AMSR team illustrating what the Archive can offer.
Ipsos has already collaborated with the Archive on its Schools Programme. A team from AMSR’s Contents Committee is providing A-level students with curated data on, for example, politics and Ipsos has contributed details of voting behaviour in the recent election so that this can be compared with two previous elections. Kelly says, “It is a privilege for us to play a role in educating young people. AMSR’s work with schools is phenomenal”.
Kelly’s vision for the future of market research is one where the industry embraces its past to inform its present and future. Through continued collaboration and support, Ipsos and AMSR can ensure that the invaluable insights contained within the Archive are accessible to researchers, informing and enriching their work for years to come.
Kelly says, “When I think of market research, I think of The Market Research Society and AMSR. These two are both absolutely critical for us. One is about setting the policy and standards for today and the future, and the other holds our heritage and our value”.
Schools Project 2024/25
Phyllis Macfarlane describes AMSR’s latest Schools Project. Its priority focus is on Politics A-Level – building curated collections for teaching material.
Review of 2024 General Election
In the A-Level Politics curriculum you must study case studies of three key general elections (one prior to 1997, the 1997 election, and one since 1997), the results and their impact on parties and government, covering:
The factors that explain the outcomes of these elections
These include:
- the reasons for and impact of party policies and manifestos, techniques used in their election campaigns, and the wider political context of the elections.
- class-based voting and other factors influencing voting patterns, such as partisanship and voting attachment.
- gender, age, ethnicity and region as factors in influencing voting behaviour, turnout and trends.
Analysis of the national voting-behaviour patterns for these elections, revealed by national data sources and how and why they vary.
Our Teacher Ambassador told us that many schools will want to cover the most recent election (in 2024) as their post-1997 election, because it is the most interesting for the students. However, it will be difficult for them to do so because the textbooks will not have caught up! So, what can AMSR do to help? Ipsos have very kindly made available to us an analysis of the voting patterns in the 2024 general election (including some very useful trend analysis, and direct comparisons with 1997) and we are currently writing short summaries on what Ipsos data shows on public attitudes to the leaders, parties, and key policies, and what happened to these over the campaign, with some supporting slides – and a brief description of the Exit Poll too. Here’s an example of voting patterns comparing 1997 with 2024. Quite striking!
The effect of Opinion Polls on elections
In addition, one of our volunteers has written a review of the effect of Opinion Polls on elections. This is to address the following item in the curriculum: 4.2 ‘The influence of the media which includes: The assessment of the role and impact of the media on politics – both during and between key General Elections, ‘including the importance and relevance of opinion polls, media bias and persuasion’. So, election by election, we have looked at, for example, data on how many people have seen Polls and know what they said, and how this has developed over time. Here are a few examples of what can be found in the Archive from the 1950s, 1983 and 1997
- The Daily Express had conducted perfectly reasonable polls of its own but announced in 1959 that ‘The Daily Express has no confidence in its own poll although it is conducted with complete integrity and all possible efficiency’, which fuelled the doubts about polls.
- Pre-1959, polls had an appreciable effect on the morale and expectations of politicians, but little impact on the electorate. However, in 1959, there were signs of a wider impact since the effect of the polls, like that of television, seems to be to stir up interest, and hence participation in the election.
- The 1983 campaign seemed characterised by incessant polling, bombarding the public daily in papers and on TV. Some politicians deplored this, seeing it as a burden when the focus should have been on issues and problems of the country.
- Some, mostly from left of Labour party, called for a ban on polls during General Elections. However, although there would be clear economic advantages to banning polls the week before an Election, the conclusion was that the public should have the freedom to learn, or choose to ignore, the state of public opinion.
- In fact analysis of coverage of polls on the front of daily newspapers found just under 5% of front page space had been allocated to opinion polls.
- Moreover, with all the talk of intrusion of polls during campaigns on the eve of polling day, Gallup asked ‘Have you seen or heard the results of an opinion poll in the last few days?’ One third, 33%, of the public said they had not seen or heard any poll. MORI on 16-20 June, asked ‘Have you seen the results of any opinion polls recently showing how people said they would vote in the General Election?’ and found by a week after polling day that 37% of the British public couldn’t recall having seen the results of any poll!
- In 1997 just over 6 people in 10 (63%) said they were aware of any national opinion polls in this election, compared with 89% at the 1992 Election, when there were more polls over a shorter period.
- Many more men (73%) than women (54%) were aware of having heard poll findings in the previous week (18-25 April), including two-thirds of those aged 45 and over, and three-quarters of middle-class respondents, but only just over 55% of working-class voters.
We shall package all of this content as the AMSR Review of the 2024 General Election for Schools and the AMSR Review of the effect of Opinion Polls on Elections. We are planning an email campaign to schools telling them that these are available – which will be both helpful to them and stimulate our numbers of users.
However, we can only pity A-level Politics students of the future. I have just read (in an online daily news summary):
“Today, declining circulations mean newspapers offer ‘only a pastiche of public opinion’, and mainstream broadcasters reach far fewer people than they once did…Deranged TikTok videos will determine the next election as much as what leads the evening news. Where once there was a discernible set of narratives, whether positive or negative, today there is only chaos”. Still, I have noticed that we do tend to catastrophise the effect of change …
EPQ – Extended Project Qualification
Our other focus this term is on EPQ’s which are a relatively new concept at A-Level. EPQ stands for Extended Project Qualification and comprises a dissertation based on a subject of the student’s choice. It counts basically as half an A-Level. What we are doing is a set of suggested topics, based on content that we have in the Archive, that the student can use as inspiration to develop, add further material etc. And it’s quite useful for us because the research can be used to produce one of our website stories or an article for Research Live, while the more extended version can be ‘starter’ material for an EPQ. Some ideas so far include: Politics and the Olympics (or Politics and Sport…)*, What the UK public thinks of US Politics/Presidents, Reviews of iconic brands from the 1970s and ‘80s e.g. Habitat or Body Shop, The development of alternative political parties e.g. the SDP.
Sociology A-Level
We are also currently summarising what we have on attitudes to crime and punishment, (e.g. Capital Punishment, Corporal Punishment of Children…) which is a part of the Sociology A-level curriculum – as well as training in research techniques.
Building Curated Collections for Schools
By building small ‘curated’ collections for schools in this way we can appeal to a number of different subjects – and since, as preparation for University and future employment, sixth form pupils are encouraged to learn to use a variety of data and archival sources, we will then promote ourselves to Sixth Form tutors and more widely. We have learnt that teachers are extraordinarily busy, and if we can produce relevant teaching materials, they will welcome them. We have much to offer!
*an example of how this might be developed for an EPQ might be: George Orwell famously described international sport and the Olympics as ‘war minus the shooting’ – was he right?
Building Dialogue with Historians
Alex Langstaff
The author of this article is a historian and lecturer based at New York University who is researching the history of sample survey research
There is a tendency among many social scientists outside of the survey and market research industry to focus exclusively on ‘using’ surveys – mining datasets, or more often, looking for summary findings in final reports. Historians are no exception. We are professionally trained to interrogate sources and think about how and why they were constructed. But for many decades my profession was particularly fond of cherry-picking an odd poll or survey statistic and dropping it into a sentence to buttress a point about social, political or economic life that had previously been made. The historian’s narrative would swiftly move on, though not perhaps without the author casting a slightly derisive backwards glance at the ‘commercial’ world that had produced the number in the first place.
I am interested in everything else about surveys. That is to say, all the proposals, professional relationships, correspondence, sample designs, documentation, newsletters, questionnaires, interviewer instructions, publicity and conference papers that surround survey research and collectively make it possible, as well as so much of modern life that we take for granted.
I am a historian and lecturer based at New York University. My research looks at the emergence of sample survey research in post-war Britain and Europe, and its reception by the general public. Historians tend to mentally inhabit one specific decade when they work. I’m currently lost in the 1970s (don’t all paths lead back to the ‘70s?). It is a strange time: general election polling comes the closest it ever has in the UK to being banned or regulated, after the 1970 debacle; multinational players are gobbling up smaller firms; Harold Wilson is appointed President of The Market Research Society, and a crisis brews in fieldwork quality and doorstep interviewer morale.
To former and current industry members alike, I want to convey my enthusiasm for fostering more interdisciplinary dialogue with historians. One of my dreams, for example, is organising a sustained dialogue between survey methodologists, historians and ethnomethodologists in anthropology about how new empirical research on interviewer recruitment and training can inform each of our fields. Perhaps one day at ESOMAR or WAPOR…
I think the Archive of Market and Social Research is doing something really innovative in laying the groundwork for more of these conversations. And the Archive is such an incredible resource. During a panel I was recently on at a major conference, I was surprised to hear that many of my colleagues still haven’t visited it online. I know that some would benefit from engaging with its holdings. I think early career academics particularly stand to gain from generating new scholarship and exciting interventions based on the unique vantage points of British social and cultural life it offers. As a researcher on the other side of the Atlantic, having access to digitised materials is also important for my work. The Archive is a kind of microcosm for late twentieth century Britain – so much so that I have now started including it in teaching undergraduate courses. Thank you to all the volunteers who make AMSR possible through donating their time, materials and expertise. Please keep up the excellent work.
Buying a Kenwood Chef
Alice Naylor
The author of this article, Alice Naylor, is a Doctoral Researcher with the University of Portsmouth and the Science Museum whose research includes the relationship of kitchen design and appliances, to the place of women. She contributed to Book 3 in our ‘Showcasing the Archive’ series with an insightful article on ‘Women at home’ , paying tribute to the rich material in the Archive that reflects consumer attitudes to kitchen and home-related themes. She focuses here on the Kenwood Chef, drawing on CRAM data to examine social and cultural changes around kitchen appliances.
The Kenwood Chef food mixer was artfully and imaginatively marketed to post-war consumers as the kitchen appliance for aspirational households. In 1960, British designer, the late Sir Kenneth Grange, was responsible for the model many people will recognise. By the early 1960s, the company had sold over 7,000,000 Chefs and the A701 graced kitchen counters from Lands’ End to John O’Groats.
Grange himself believed the Chef…” became an icon of aspiration and status – the perfect wedding present which went with the trend towards ‘fancy’ cooking” (Financial Times, 29 September 2023). Such was its appeal that many housewives saw it as an essential piece of kitchen equipment. They were prepared to enter into significant negotiations to justify the purchase of this fashionable and high-status food mixer.
The desires of 1970s housewives to acquire these goods is evidenced by a market survey conducted in the early 1970s drawn from the CRAM/Peter Cooper archives (Project A.583/JF, 1974). The survey was conducted to categorise housewives’ attitudes to ‘hand and electric kitchen equipment blenders’ including coffee machines and food mixers. It has provided valuable insight into the belief system around the socio-cultural uses of aspirational kitchen equipment including the Kenwood Chef. The Kenwood brand featured heavily in the survey and the Chef was seen as ‘almost a generic for mixers’ with one respondent declaring “When you think of mixers you just think of Kenwood” (p.11). The report revealed some of the social and financial barriers that prevailed should women wish to buy desirable kitchen equipment without it having to be justified as ‘essential’ to the household. What was particularly revealing was the attitudes and rationale for households acquiring electric appliances. Sub-categories of appliances were listed under the headings ‘Basic’, ‘Bonus Operational’, and ‘Bonus Status’ and are useful to understand what households defined as essential and desirable for their homes. For example, ‘basic’ items included vacuum cleaners and washing machines; a freezer and tumble dryer were considered ‘bonus operational’ and the ‘bonus status’, appliances included a coffee maker and ‘free-standing mixer’ (p.8). It would appear acquiring a ‘bonus status’ item required some ‘justification’ which was ‘related to the level to which such purchase could be justified as aiding the whole family rather than merely the housewife’ (p.9). A simple example is the purchase of a television which could reasonably be said to aid to the enjoyment of the entire family. The findings conceded this might stretch to a freezer which appeared to have more of a general function for the family.
Arguably, a food mixer could be perceived in the same way, yet it appeared to be the bonus status item that proved somewhat elusive for many of the housewives. Justification for these purchases may have had its roots in the social and financial challenges facing working housewives. Many were dependent on their husbands’ salaries to acquire even the basic electric appliances they wished for, particularly those that were solely for their use. Television sets and freezers, however much they would benefit the entire family, would require a significant outlay of the household budget. This might necessitate taking out a hire purchase agreement and paying in instalments over twelve months or more. Even if the housewife-consumer was the key chooser and spender of the domestic budget, women were not able to take out a hire-purchase contract themselves. Such contracts were legally binding and married women were obliged to get their husbands’ signatures when entering into hire purchase contracts: single women had to gain signatures from their fathers. This practice continued until the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 outlawed discrimination against women seeking to obtain goods, facilities or services, including loans or credit.
For housewives who were not able to persuade their spouses to sign a hire purchase agreement, the survey concluded there was a way for them to acquire the ‘bonus’ items they dreamt of.
“Stamp or coupon redemption catalogues appeared to be another acceptable source for obtaining reasonably priced electrical equipment. Again it appeared that actual cash expenditure on the items was heavily begrudged whereas cigarette coupons or Green Shield stamps were the types of bonuses which a woman could offer herself” (AMSR, 1974, p.10).
The findings of market survey reports held by the AMSR are of huge value to researchers. My research focuses extensively on social and cultural history concerning consumer durables such as the Kenwood Chef. The report offers a way of understanding the social and cultural attitudes towards British housewives in the early 1970s and crucially allows their voices to be heard. It came as some surprise that well into the 1970s, stay-at-home wives were obligated to make some sort of justification for electric kitchen appliances that many believe are part of the standard fittings of the British household. The report concluded that “In the majority of cases the products (including a Kenwood Chef) were received as gifts from weddings, older children or anxious husbands”. (Project A.583/JF, 1974, p.34). To draw on insights from this report related closely to my research on the Kenwood Chef food mixer has added immeasurably to the richness of my findings. I am grateful to the AMSR archival material that enables me to understand how the Kenwood Chef came into the home and the negotiations required to enable this ‘bonus status’ food mixer to perch on the kitchen counter of British housewives.
ESOMAR Congress
Adam Phillips reports from this year’s Congress in Athens
The theme, Mind, Myth and Machines was a reference to the culture in Greece 2,000 years ago and the philosophers at that time whose ideas formed the basis of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and which still underlie the way our sector works today.
There was a sense, particularly from the panel discussions and the stands in the exhibition that ‘Tech’ has finally transformed the world of Insights and has created an opportunity for the Insight role in client companies to become more powerful. The feeling that we are in the eye of a disruptive storm made for a much more interesting event than usual.
Many of the presentations focused on practical experience with AI and the ways in which AI is going to change the Research, Analytics and Insights sector in the future. Two interesting facts:
- 2022 was the year when the global spend on data analytics surpassed that on traditional market research[1]
- Since recovering from the Covid pandemic in 2020-21, more than half of all research projects globally have been conducted by the client doing the projects themselves[2].
In the world of major market research events, the ESOMAR Congress is a unique survivor from the days before globalisation. Every year it moves to a different country and makes an effort to help those attending the conference – 1,200 this year – experience the culture of the country they are visiting. This gives it a slightly quaint feel for those used to managing their business from an office in Santa Clara, New York or London. Another unusual aspect is that presenters are expected to submit a written paper to the Programme Committee explaining what they will be presenting in more detail than is possible in the 20-minute slot for the presentation. This facilitates informed discussion when new techniques are being presented. Those attending the Conference received a 710-page collection of 47 papers a couple of weeks in advance of the event.
Unfortunately, ESOMAR did not provide time for questions, or any other form of collective interaction with the speakers. The social media app was only useful for networking. This was a pity since there were lots of ideas and concepts being discussed. ESOMAR is also unusual in making a serious effort to allow young researchers to engage with the event and present their own work, with an award going to the best work.
Ray Poynter, the President of ESOMAR, set the scene at the opening with a speech explaining how to get value from such an international conference. He reminded us that, with so many different countries represented, this was an opportunity to learn about different cultures and make new contacts. He explained that it was not possible for anyone to attend even half of all the presentations because of the number of parallel sessions. He encouraged the audience to expand their networks by meeting new people and asking them what they had learned. Because there were three parallel sessions running most of the time, my experience is based on attending about a third of the presentations and talking with others.
There was a lot of discussion about synthetic data. There is no agreement about how synthetic data should be created and when it is appropriate to use it. The name makes it sound like a way to cut costs by inventing data rather than collecting it from real people. Having listened to the presentations and talked with exhibitors, I think that synthetic data will become an important tool. When properly constructed, it appears to provide a way of using behavioural data collected from multiple sources, including social media, media consumption, purchasing records and survey data to segment brand consumers and produce much richer quantitative/qualitative profiles of the different segments than more traditional approaches. These profiles can be engagingly written up, or made into videos, by a suitably trained AI. However, as was regularly pointed out, synthetic data also has the potential to be very misleading and possibly also an unethical invasion of individuals’ privacy. Nevertheless, solutions to these problems will be found and it is almost certainly going to be widely adopted. It will be cheaper than commissioning huge surveys, although it’s essential that there are still some high-quality comprehensive surveys to ground the synthesis in reality. One of the panel discussions suggested that assuring the quality of synthetic data and analytic work produced by AI tools could create a much more powerful role for the heads of Insights within companies. However, the panel did not agree about how likely this outcome was. Steve Phillips (CEO of Zappi) thought it was likely and Tim Wragg (CEO of Human8) thought that Insights had already missed the boat.
The other major theme was experience with using what is already becoming more traditional AI, Large Language Models (LLM’s) like ChatGPT, with conversational interfaces and learning abilities that make extracting and communicating information from data a lot more efficient. There were a number of case studies and experiments presented demonstrating the power and impressive capability of these tools. Everyone caveated their results by saying that human intervention is still needed to make sure that there are no obvious errors, and that all the data has been interrogated properly and questions correctly phrased. Nevertheless, it was clear that this type of AI is going to massively speed up repetitive tasks that involve analysis and reporting similar data. It will also make it much easier to research databases containing past data and reports to find useful information that is relevant to current topics. Some of the leading companies already have significant targets in next year’s business plans for the proportion of work that should be done by AI.
My takeout from the Congress was that synthetic data is still at the embryonic stage. In the longer term, it is likely to be an important addition to the toolbox for strategic and creative research, once the tools for producing it are more developed, and the legal privacy and ethical issues have been resolved. LLM’s have already been introduced into the Insights workplace and will be taken up more widely and more quickly than synthetic data. These are going to be much more disruptive than synthetic data because everyone in the organisation will be able to use them to do their own analysis and research. Managing the quality of the output is going to be a major problem. In the short term this kind of AI is much more likely to be used to support tactical research where repetition will help the AI quickly learn to produce reliable output. The trend for more research and analytics to be carried out directly by clients will continue because it will be quicker, easier and more secure than using a full-service research agency.
Of course there were other streams in the Congress. Given my background, three presentations stood out for me.
- A presentation by Xabier Palacio, Head of Intelligence, Advocacy and Standards at ESOMAR and Judith Passingham, Chairman of the ESOMAR Professional Standards Committee, presented in a poorly attended plenary session at the end of day one. ESOMAR’s Professional Standards and Legal Affairs committees are working on some important problems which deserve more support and engagement from the Insights community. These include
- The Global Quality Initiative in collaboration with a number of other leading national and international associations designed to raise standards in the survey sector and online survey samples in particular.
- Keeping the door open for professional research and analytics to collect good quality data by lobbying government and business.
- Providing global guidance on topics as diverse as: Best practice for measuring international demographics’, 20 questions to help buyers of AI-based services for market research and insights, and The Freedom to Conduct and Publish Opinion Polls and 14 other useful topics available on the ESOMAR website.
- A presentation from Mars about developing and launching On Demand Delivery (ODD). Mars’ aim is to deliver a product to consumers in their large city catchment areas (most of the population) within 20 minutes. Deliveroo, Uber and Amazon have been working for some time on the same issue, but there is evidence that manufacturers of impulse goods e.g. confectionery, drinks, toiletries, cosmetics and many grocery products, now see an opportunity for direct delivery from manufacturer to customer, cutting out the retailer, improving their margins and building a direct relationship with the customer.
- The winning presentation among the 10 submitted by the members of YES, the Young ESOMAR Society was on a way to obtain more accurate responses to questions in international research. The author was Jaimie Smits who works at SKIM in The Netherlands. The recommendations were nothing new but, with the massive growth in DIY research, we need to keep reminding untrained individuals who are designing questionnaires that this is a skill that must be learnt if the output of a survey is not to be misleading.
I left feeling motivated by the work that my fellow Insighters are doing, and optimistic about the future of our sector. The challenge for AMSR will be to find a way to preserve the conversations, as well as the numbers, in the digital, connected, agile world in which we are now living.
[1] Global Market Research 2023, ESOMAR, p13
[2] Global Users and Buyers of Insights, ESOMAR p15
Better Statistics
Tony Dent discusses some of the latest issues concerning Better Statistics
Review of UKSA
As reported previously Professor Denise Lievesley, who is President of AMSR, has written an important review of the future of UKSA making a number of recommendations for change. UKSA have now published their response to those recommendations and BSC have issued a very useful document, publishing those responses interleaved with the original recommendations – see BSC version.
Better Statistics will comment on UKSA’s reply at some point but meanwhile the first of the Triennial assemblies suggested by Professor Lievesley has now been announced. It is scheduled for 22 January 2025 and the deadline for suggestions is 3 November. We are planning a special meeting on 24 October to discuss suggestions for suitable topics for the Assembly. Please contact tony@betterstats.net if you’d like further information.
Misleadingness
During the election campaign Sir Robert Chote (Chairman of UKSA) had warned the political parties about providing misleading statistics. The OSR has now published this new working definition of misleadingness: “We are concerned when, on a question of significant public interest, statistics are used to communicate a descriptive statement that the wider relevant statistical evidence would not support, despite otherwise being an accurate statement”.
Ironically, adherence to this definition will have an impact on the usage UKSA can make of its very own survey measuring Public Confidence in Official Statistics. The most recent survey is referenced by Sir Ian Diamond’s introduction to the UKSA response to Professor Lievesley’s 19 recommendations as mentioned above, claiming: “It is heartening then that public trust in official statistics has remained high in recent years (as measured in the recent Public Confidence in Official Statistics 2023 survey)”. That survey was also quoted by Sir Ian Diamond in his letter of 15 May 2024 to the then Chairman of PACAC, Dame Jackie Doyle-Price, saying “87% of survey respondents said they trust in the ONS. Similarly, 85% of respondents said they trust the statistics produced by the ONS”. There is no evidence to corroborate these statements and Better statistics do not accept the implication that these figures represent the views of the British public; otherwise the survey might have achieved a higher response rate than 21.2% of households sampled.
Quoting figures from surveys with very low response rates, without providing corroborative evidence is a common feature of today’s information landscape for both public and commercial information. Often the implications may not be of importance but, whenever the figures are on a subject of public interest, BSC agree with the OSR that corroborative evidence should be sought.
We had provided Sir Robert Chote, Chairman of UKSA, with similar observations to the above in August 2022, with the following observation:
Meaningless “We welcome the OSR’s continued concern to improve the understanding of this important issue and would suggest that every report should also comment on representation or potential bias as well as confidence intervals. As noted … there must be the possibility of significant bias whenever response rates are low and non-response has not been investigated, as was the case with last year’s Survey on Public Confidence.
Confidence. In respect of confidence intervals, we suggest that consideration should be given to using the coefficient of variation instead of such intervals whenever there is a series of estimates being provided. This facilitates comparisons of reliability across the different measures in a manner that confidence intervals often conceal”.
Advertising Standards Authority
The ASR has the important responsibility for ensuring that our advertisements are not misleading. I recently had a case of misuse of Kantar data by a food company, which I need to follow up! If you have concerns about advertisements, they should be raised with the ASR. Possibly of more significance in the political context is Full Fact who ‘fight bad information’ saying “We are a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm it does”. BSC believe that there is nothing more important than getting facts right in today’s world.
OSR Assessments
We have completed our submission for the OSR’s assessment of the 2021 Censuses for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and are now part way through providing feedback to the Systemic Review of Economic Statistics. When completed we propose to publish our contributions to both these reviews on the BSC website, as well as the assessment of the PIPR (Price Index for Private Rents) and the Winter CIS, as provided to the OSR earlier in the year.
BSC consider these reviews demonstrate systemic difficulties with ONS communications, from website deficiencies to a lack of insight in reporting through to a failure to provide adequate information of the methods used for the work. Possibly this latter is of most concern when measuring the UK economy, where there are many issues beyond solely ONS measurements. For further insight see Shaun Richards blog on “Changing the Debt and Deficit Rules?” Personally, I agree with Shaun’s comment that international ‘standards’ too often lead to low standards. Moreover, as a young OECD statistician confirmed to me at an ESCoE meeting, they are rarely actually met because of different interpretations of the standard from country to country. Although they may be in agreement as to the principles behind the standard, each country has a different way of measuring it.
PACAC
The new Parliament has elected Simon Hoare MP to the chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and we have written to him (and the Committee) to request that the Committee will take a greater interest in UKSA and our National Statistics than was the case in the last Parliament.
Next Seminar
We have postponed our proposed Seminar on Productivity and AI until next year. Primarily because we consider it important to prepare for the first of the Triennial conferences, as commented above.
Recent Additions To The Archive
The Phyllis Macfarlane Column
I was much amused by Alex Flagstaff’s comment: ‘Don’t all paths lead back to the ‘70s?’ I had already identified some gems from that period and earlier from amongst all the materials that we’ve loaded in the last few months. I think you’ll be amazed, amused and intrigued by them – whether you were there at the time or not. The world has certainly changed in the last 50 years! But first one of the icons of the 80s – The Body Shop – which was launched in 1976 …
From Alan Hedges attic
The Body Shop
When the brand Body Shop went into administration in February 2024, I looked to see what we had on it in the Archive, and was disappointed to find that we didn’t have very much at all, so we couldn’t provide a story. Even though I knew that we had material on attitudes to animal testing within the Archive, and TGI data on consumption of Body Shop products, we didn’t have any research conducted for Body Shop itself. However, lurking in the boxes rescued from Alan Hedges’ attic we find that we now do have two reports, which have recently been uploaded to the Archive. And, given that the latest news from September 2024 is that the Body Shop brand has been rescued from administration, with investment firm Aurea acquiring it, it seems a good time to reprise the brand.
Launched in 1976, it’s difficult now to remember just how popular the Body Shop was. The RSGB Omnibus research from 1995 shows that 17% of all women rising to 30% of all women ABC1 under 35 had visited a Body Shop in the previous 2 weeks. 30% is an astonishingly high number! Body Shop Omnibus ’95: report on research – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org), And I imagine that was already past their peak, given that they were already starting to research lapsed users…
The 1995 report: “Body Shop lapsed users: verbatims from group discussion research preceded by a summary report on the same research” is a lovely collection of verbatims about the Body Shop and its position vis á vis other outlets – but it’s already clear that competition was catching up. Body Shop lapsed users: verbatims from group discussion research preceded by a summary report on the same research – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
In an NOP poll from June 1988, in a section on the ‘New Woman’, Anita Roddick was rated a very much-admired woman in the UK. Respondents were given a list of four women in different fields and asked which they most admired. The four were Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, feminist guru Germaine Greer, and actress Felicity Kendall (who had recently been chosen in a poll of women of all ages and class groups as a favourite person). Mrs Thatcher and Anita Roddick scored equally on 33% and 36%, with Felicity Kendall on 11% and Germaine Greer on 7%. A further 12% said they did not admire any of the four. NOP Political, Social, Economic Review Issue no.70 1988 June – NOP Reports – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org). That’s an impressive result for Anita Roddick, however slightly weird the question!
I wonder if there was any research done for Body Shop during their heyday of the ‘80s – perhaps they didn’t think they needed it, their appeal was so successful? But then remember that Apple claimed never to do research – and we all knew that they did. Do any of our readers remember doing research for Body Shop in the’70s and ‘80s? I’m going to suggest it as a Modern British History dissertation – so it would be good to know!
Drinking and Driving Research
This is a 1979 qualitative study for Guinness looking at the possible introduction of a low-alcohol bar drink in the context of overall drinking habits at the time. It looks at attitudes to drinking and driving. And it’s interesting – the strong association of alcohol with out-of-home rather than in-home drinking at the time – contrasting with more recent behaviour. Concept Two qualitative research [beer] – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
The last few sentences of this next paragraph in a section on ‘current drinking practices’ make you realise how much drinking has changed since those days (though to be fair, the sample is of beer drinkers):
In one sense it could be said that individual drinking patterns of respondents varied as greatly as the respondents themselves. There are, however, a number of generalisations that can readily be made. For example, people drink more in the evenings than in the afternoon and more at weekends than weekdays with Sunday lunchtime and Friday and Saturday night being reported as three of the most popular drinking times. This no doubt relates partly to the fact that there is no work next day. The popularity of Friday may also relate to the fact that it is, or used to be, pay day for many, as well as the start of the weekend. Many men claim to drink every day at lunchtime and/or after work. Holidays are another ’peak’ drinking time for many people.
The following verbatims will make you smile (or cringe, perhaps?):
‘A man goes in (to a pub) and if he’s anything like a regular, his drink’s waiting for him’.
‘You really can’t go out and leave her alone with them (the children), but when they grow up you then do tend to…. you never get back to the 8 pints a night’.
’ The average fellow who’s had a fairly wild life is bound to drink less once he gets married’
And the recommendations are well worth reading:
“Our view is that the presentation of a new product as some species of ‘low-alcohol‘ drink to use when drinking and driving’ would be doomed to failure. This is a negative ‘reason why’ and would tend to arouse all the drinkers’ resistances. It would be like bringing the Sunday School into the bar”.
They go on to recommend that it should be thought of as more like shandy and, “it is envisaged, too, that this product be packaged in a bottle of a pint, or nearly a pint, capacity. This is in order that the male drinker taking it can hold his drink in a pint glass and thereby be enabled to appear as virile as any other pint drinker.”
Public Participation in Local Authority Planning
Two reports (1974/5) for the Department of the Environment about the effectiveness of various techniques of publicity and public participation during local authority preparation of structure plans. The first deals with the use of consultants (whose use is now endemic in the production of Local Plans), and the second stresses the pre-eminent role of local newspapers – now withered on the vine – in publicising public meetings.
I was impressed by some thought-provoking comments:
‘When considering local government administration, as Bains reminded us, our ‘object must be to make democracy as efficient as possible, not to make efficiency as democratic as possible’,.
‘…the local newspaper was most frequently mentioned as the medium through which respondents had first heard about the public meetings’.
‘….public meetings are an essential democratic institution and can perform a unique and valuable function. At the same time their form has been allowed to become excessively stereotyped and their organisation too automatic’ .
It seems that the erosion of local democracy has been ongoing for quite some time!
Marketing and London Transport
The Archive also includes a number of proposals for projects. This one from 1970 explores London Transport in terms of its need to increase revenues, but perhaps, more interestingly to clarify its identity and improve its image. It concludes by recommending a rather large Corporate Image survey, Marketing and London Transport – Proposals and tenders – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Vandalism: an approach through consultation on a London housing estate
An SCPR project for NACRO – the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders – conducted in 1978. The aim of the project was to carry out – for a London Borough – a demonstration project on a London housing estate: 1. to reduce vandalism and other associated problems by implementing improvements based on plans made by tenants through consultations. 2. to improve communications between tenants and council. And 3. to serve as a demonstration project providing lessons which could be applied to other estates in the borough. The conclusion was that the core of the problem was the difficulty or inability of local authorities to deliver minor, agreed, affordable improvements within a timescale that was reasonable to tenants. How depressing was that? Vandalism: an approach through consultation on a London housing estate – the TIP project – Papers and Offprints – (oclc.org)
From Peter Bartam
How to Conduct Car Clinics
Anyone who has a nostalgia for Car Clinics, The Ford Motor Company or specifically the Ford Fiesta, or happy memories of working with the great Peter Smith (Ford) and Kit Molloy (MIL) must take a few moments to look at this: The MRS Market Research Schools Pack: Case Study 3. Market research and Ford Fiesta from 1976. An interesting tour round the research that would have been done prior to launch. I’ve never seen this sort of pack before and didn’t know the MRS had done them, but looking at it I see that it could be a model for the current work with schools. Just look at the picture – the sun-roof – the style! How early 1970s is that!
And read this footnote on the story about the choice of name: it may be apocryphal – but who cares!
Market Research Schools Pack: Case Study 3. Market research and Ford Fiesta – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Life Assurance in Russia
This is from 1995: Life assurance in Russia (presentation) by City Research Associates – maybe not politically correct at present but a reflection of how much things were (believed to be) opening up in the 1990s. I thought this chart particularly poignant….
Life assurance in Russia (presentation) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Sunday Times Readership
A 1967 readership and circulation analysis for the Sunday Times: ‘The Sunday Times and the quality press: information based on survey research data, complete with hand drawn charts – very nostalgic!
It was the great age of the colour magazines – here’s what they said:
“As can be seen in Graph No· 6, the readership of the Sunday Times and Observer colour magazines is comparatively higher than that of their parent papers; with the Daily Telegraph the reverse is true and this is probably because, among other causes, many readers of the Daily Telegraph on Fridays do not have the time or opportunity to see the magazine. The Telegraph, using more intensive questioning techniques, have carried out research to demonstrate that their colour magazine’s readership is substantially higher. But altogether it is an area in which much more needs to be known, and the question as to how many people read the colour magazines, and when and where, remains largely unresolved”.
I love the candour, and the fact that graphs still had to be hand drawn in 1967! The Sunday Times and the quality press: information based on survey research data – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
What Next?
Next time we will have a collection of fascinating Media reports donated by Roger Gane. Stand by for the history of TV audience measurement, peoplemeters, the effect of satellite channels, the impact of video recorders, RAJAR, advertising and much more. If that’s not classical content, then I don’t know what is!
Obituary: Remembering John Barter
Peter Bartram writes
John Barter, aged nearly 90, died peacefully at the start of September in his home near Horsham in Sussex, supported by his wife Valerie, their son Graham and daughter Judith.
Immediate reactions to this sad news among those who worked with him show he is universally remembered in a very positive way, for instance being described as ‘such a lovely man’, ‘an exceptional man’, ‘very kind and generous, the epitome of integrity’.
He was born, lived and schooled in Norwich, and after graduating from the LSE, qualified as a chartered accountant before joining the RAF until 1961. He then joined NOP as its fourth employee, and in 1966 became Joint MD along with Frank Teer, in which time it was developed from an opinion poll subsidiary of the Daily Mail Group into a leading full-service market research company. He remained there until 1991, having become full MD after Frank’s earlier retirement.
He served on several MRS committees and was MRS Chairman 1979-81. He did many things to promote good research in Britain and as Chairman of AMSO, among other things persuaded its members to launch the Interviewer Card Scheme (ICS), which subsequently led to the world-wide adoption of the ISO 20252 industry standard. He also worked extensively as a consultant and expert witness in legal proceedings involving the use of survey data in evidence.
His whole career brought great credit and success to the research industry and he is very much missed by all those who knew him.
Newsletter No. 3, July 2024
Letter from the Editor
Working with Archives makes one extremely aware of time, particularly the way past, present and future interact with each other. Many years ago, I was privileged to attend several Seminars on Time Theory organised by Professor Gabriele Morello, formerly Head of ISIDA, the prestigious Business school in Sicily. Many of you will know his work on Consumer Behaviour. Gabriele developed a model of personal time perception whereby people can be measured on their dimensions of their perception of past, present and future, and this can be related to their consumer behaviour. Another model emerging from Time Studies was developed by Professor Barbara Adam. She identified the concept of ‘Tiimescapes’, which like landscapes, characterise clusters. The timeline can be viewed as a series of ’nows’ which overlap and refer back to ‘befores’ and forward to the future. For instance, in the context of environmental issues, she suggests that past, present and future can be regarded as interdependent. It is philosophies of this kind which echo the concept of an archive. No one period of time can be viewed in isolation. Over the decades people’s behaviour and attitudes can change – as Book 2 in our ‘Showcasing the Archive’ series showed very vividly – but within these changes are the interlocking events of different experience of time, where past affects the present, and the present foreshadows the future. True insight is dependent on these interactions.
As a coda, we have been approached by an academic, recommended by Mass Observation, with a special interest in ‘Tmescapes’ who would like to work with us on a research project! There’ s plenty of scope: Timescapes focus on time to facilitate a deeper understanding of the interactions between environments, economic, political and socio-cultural concerns – all issues embedded ln the rich collections of the Archive.
We are delighted that Jim Whaley has joined the Board of Trustees.
Adam Phillips, Chief Executive AMSR says, “He has been an unfailing supporter of the Archive for many years, and we appreciate his dedication to the market research industry, not only in the US but in this country”. Look at the website for more about Jim.
We are very proud that Ian Brace, a Trustee and Chairman of AMSR’s Governance and Development Committees has been awarded the prestigious MRS Gold Medal. See below for his take on this honour.
10 June was the highlight of the AMSR year, with a reprise of the Summer Party at Bush House. Great ambience, a short but highly pertinent set of presentations and a panel of leading researchers, confirmed that AMSR is no longer a start-up but an Important brand in the sector. There is an overview below and an audio-video recording and photos of the Event on our website. Do take a look. https/www.amsr.uk/amsr-summer-event-10th June-2024
We continue our interviews with leaders of the sector talking to Amy Cashman, Executive Managing Director, Kantar Insights Division. She is enthusiastic about the Archive.” I see the role of AMSR as an ambassador for the industry”, she says.
As part of the Awareness Campaign, AMSR volunteers are attending sector events on a regular basis spreading information about the Archive and encouraging people to use it.
Adam Phillips attended an eve of Election Event hosted by King’s College London and The Policy Institute. He reports below.
We are very grateful to the MRS for facilitating our participation in its Conferences and Seminars. We are especially pleased to meet so many younger people, some new entrants to market research, who may not have heard of the Archive. But they become really enthusiastic when they see it in action and realise how much this source of information can help them in their work. There are reports below on the MRS Storytelling Conference and the Better Statistics Seminar on Inflation. Later in the month Paul Gebara attended the MRS Best of Events and Awards Conference in Manchester.
As usual Phyllis Macfarlane looks at some recent additions to the Archive with her customary insight and wit.
Ian Brace awarded the MRS Gold Medal
We are proud and delighted that Ian Brace, a member of AMSR’s Board of Trustees, has been awarded the MRS Gold Medal, the Society’s most prestigious honour. He is one of the 18 individuals to have received this Award since its inception in 1982.
He received the Medal at the MRS Excellence Awards lunch on the 7 June. It recognises nearly 40 years supporting the institutions which protect and promote the sector and the charities which serve it. Ian’s most outstanding contribution has been his dedicated involvement in the Market Research Benevolent Association (MRBA), the Charity set up 47 years ago by Bryan Bates and the late Gerald Goodhardt and Jenny Bowen, to help market researchers, particularly fieldworkers, in need of financial support and advice. Ian was a Trustee and Chairman of MRBA for over 20 years.
Ian joined the MRS in 1975 and his roles have included membership of its Research Standards Board and its predecessor, the Professional Standards Committee. He also served on the MRS Investigations Committee which investigated disciplinary complaints. A recognised expert in questionnaire design, he authored the MRS Questionnaire Design Guidelines which continues to be regarded as the key best practice guide in this area. He also wrote a textbook. Questionnaire Design: how to plan, structure and write strong material for effective market research as part of the MRS Best Practice series. Ian is thrilled that it is now in its fifth edition and is available in four languages, including Chinese. He has them on his shelves. “It’s a pity I can’t read them in the original”, he comments regretfully.
Ian has continued his unstinting dedication to high standards in market research in his work with AMSR. A founding volunteer, as well as being a member of the Board of Trustees, he serves on the Executive Committee, is Chairman of the Governance and Development Committees, keeping us on our toes, and ensuring that we adhere to the correct procedures required by the Charity Commission and Data Protection law.
Talking to him about the Medal, Ian said, “I am deeply honoured by this unexpected award. The research sector has always had a culture of help and support for each other and I am delighted to be able to continue that with the AMSR, which is extremely important in promoting and underpinning the sector’s value to society”.
AMSR Summer Party
L-R: Jim Whaley, David Tross, James Endersby, Kelly Beaver and Richard Asquith
Another year, another highly enjoyable AMSR Summer Party, now a ‘go-to’ event in the sector calendar. There was tremendous buzz at the event on 10 June. Once again, thanks to the generosity of The Policy Institute, King’s College, it was held in the spacious room on the 8th floor of Bush House with its lovely outside terrace overlooking the Aldwych.
There were over 80 attendees and it was good to see so many young people, not only new recruits to the sector, or offsprings of volunteers, but several A-level students of history and politics who had used the Archive in their studies.
AMSR has come a long way since its inception in 2015. It has journeyed from a ‘start-up’ new product to an established brand in its own right. This was vividly demonstrated in Chief Executive Adam Phillips’ presentation, in which he set out the phases of the Archive’s development, and the achievements of the past year and its well thought-out plans for the next year and the sustainable future. AMSR is now in phase 3, promoting the Archive to users when a critical mass of useful material has been assembled. In the longer term the plan is to associate with a university, attract significant grants to support the Archive and extend sponsorship opportunities beyond the market research sector. We are in Phase 1 of the journey towards accreditation by the National Archives, a quality control standard similar to ISO 20252 for market and social research.
Last September an Awareness Campaign was launched on social media to raise awareness and understanding of AMSR. This has resulted in a significant increase in the number of visitors to the Portal Archive. Coupled with other awareness-raising activities including attending conferences, academic fairs and emailing schoolteachers, the average number of monthly visitors to the online Archive has more than tripled in just over three years. It is imperative that we continue to grow our user base, both within the research and insight sectors and beyond to academia and schools.
The title of Head of Contents Phyllis Macfarlane’s presentation was ‘Education, Education, Education’. It is this sector that we have identified as the main target user, for growth and sustainability. If we can encourage students to use our Archive as a source of information and research data, we can accrue a continuous group of cohorts who use the Archive in the same, easy way they use Google. She stressed that teachers don’t have much time and therefore we have to curate material for them. Phyllis gave an overview of our projects with schools. She pointed out that we had initially believed that schools were mainly interested in our material on Modern British History. However, we discovered (by research of course) only about 5% of schools concentrate on our mainly post-WW2 material (modern goes much further back in the curriculum). But AS and A-level students are interested in the mass of information we have on politics and sociology.
We have vast amounts of data about polls e.g. voting intentions over time, assessments as to what happened when the polls went wrong, key issues and leader and party profiles, as well as qualitative reports on political brands. Phyllis talked about the plans to produce a ‘Review of the 2024 election’. It can be one of the three elections studied in the curriculum, adding insights to those of 1974 and 1997.
For the sociology curricula we are particularly good on ‘crime and punishment’. The Archive also has a strong collection of research techniques and methods and sources of data. We know we have to help students and we are producing teaching resources with examples of research studies as inspiration.
The current focus is on schools, but we have regular contacts with individual universities, both to help students and post-graduates with their dissertations and plan specific joint research projects and grant applications.
Phyllis went on to talk about the need to engage research agencies and our plans to generate marketing case studies. We need more volunteers with experience in interpreting our marketing data to make it relevant for agencies. You can’t do a good job of marketing a brand unless you know and understand its product and sector history.
The formal part of the evening closed with a panel discussion chaired by Richard Asquith. It comprised three sector leaders — Kelly Beaver, CEO Ipsos UK, James Endersby, CEO Opinium, and MRS Chairman and Jim Whaley, CEO Ovation- MR – and an academic user, David Tross, Associate Lecturer in the School of Social Science, Birkbeck College.
Inter alia, the panellists considered how the Archive was typically used and what would make it more useful. In particular, how we can interest the social and market research and insight sectors and especially agency researchers in making more use of AMSR resources? And crucially, why is it important that the market research industry is seen to be supporting education in this country?
David Tross, who is working on happiness research, and who contributed a chapter in Book 2 in our ‘Showcasing the Archive’ series, said he loved the Archive because it is ‘free and easy’. It is invaluable for deriving different perspectives on an issue and for tracking longitudinal data to see how things have changed (or not). He would like to see more consistency and continuity. (But that of course is contingent on the material we receive).
James Endersby thinks it essential to get the Archive into the hands of young people. Kelly Beaver underlined this “They need to respect the value research can make”.
Jim Whaley stressed the importance of the Archive in presenting a legacy of the history of research. We celebrate research and he urged the audience to join in this celebration.
In the discussion of how to curate presentations in agencies to show them how to use the Archive, Kelly Beaver pointed to the need to position these at various levels to suit the needs of the different agencies.
Everyone on the panel stressed the need to support AMSR, with material, money, and crucially by using it. This is not for an agency’s commercial gain but to enhance the value of the market and social research sector to business and society, to educate young people about its value in their work and as James Endersby pointed out, to see it as a ‘destination career’. “We have to support our sector’s organisations and take responsibility for checking the health of our industry”.
In his closing remarks. Chairman Patrick Barwise, likened the AMSR journey to long journeys with small children who constantly chant, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ “The honest answer at this point is ‘We don’t know’. But I hope it’s clear that – with your help and support – we’re getting there, and should be proud of what we’re creating together”. He thanked not only the generous sponsors of the Event: Delineate, Kantar, Opinium, Ovation-MR and the Policy Institute at King’s College, but the volunteers and supporters for their continuous and dedicated involvement with the Archive. “Over time we think the Archive will become a standard resource for teachers, students, researchers and anyone else with an interest in modern British culture and society. No other country has anything comparable”.
Do go onto the website: www.amsr.org.uk for a full audio-visual recording of the formal proceedings as well as photos of the convivial party which followed.
Amy Cashman Interview
I recently caught up with Amy Cashman, UK & Ireland CEO, Kantar Insights Division
We began by talking about Insight and the growth of this concept over the decades: its evolution from an adjunct to market and social research to its position today where they are often seen as synonymous. Amy sees market research as one of the processes that are used. “A classic market research survey is a key component, but is only one of the ways insight is generated. At Kantar we use all sorts of approaches: digital research, client supplied data, qualitative research. But insight is the key driver. It is what we utilise to respond to clients’ questions. That is what we do”.
AMSR is very grateful to Kantar for its support – not only in a material way but in contributing papers and reports that can be part of the rich collections we are amassing. The aim is to become an essential source of reference on all types of research, not only for people in our sector, but in schools and universities. It can help not only in the sphere of modern history, but in politics and sociology. If it is not in the Archive we can point to other analogous sources. I asked Amy how she sees the role of the Archive. “It is an ambassador for the industry”. She believes it showcases the value and importance of research within a wider context, enriching all the other types of data and information that are available. It can also help in training – this is fundamental for seeing the work that has been done in the past. If it’s in the Archive people can just be pointed to the source.
We discussed the added value it can give to academics, particularly with their dissertations, and the way in can help in training in schools, both as a source of information and understanding of how to use Archives. Amy is delighted that Kantar has proprietary and thought leadership material that can be given to the Archive. It is fortunate that it has the resources for this type of non-commercial work as there are obvious challenges around sharing client-funded data. She understands this may be more challenging for smaller agencies who have less resources to invest in self-funded thought leadership work. The Archive can retain material, get it scanned if necessary, but not put in the public arena: we are very sensitive to the issue of client confidentiality and have protocols to address this problem.
AMSR would like to support agencies in any way it can. Was there any way it can help Kantar? Amy points out, ”The research we do is very commercial and forward-looking in nature. The kind of questions we get from clients don’t usually cause us to look back into trends from decades previously, but we understand for agencies more in the public, societal or governmental realm this is much more helpful”.
Looking at the interconnectivity of past, present and future which is embedded in the Archive, Amy described some of the concepts which clients have used over many decades. Cadbury’s ‘Glass and a Half in everyone’ is a brand message that has been used for many years as an example. “We have had webinars showing clients how a concept which works can evolve over time. An imaginative idea at the beginning of a brand story can go on to have constant repetition. The consistency of the message remains, but the context changes and has to be brought up-to-date”.
One of the best examples of this brand development is L’Oreal which has been delivering the brand message ‘Because You’re Worth It’ for some 50 years. “The L’Oreal campaign is symbolic of empowering women of all ages and backgrounds to believe in their own beauty and sense of worth. It is meaningful not only for women in one generation and their mothers and grandmothers, and will continue to be so in the future. You can take something and adjust the social context of a given moment so that it resonates in a different way”.
On this theme of seeing brand evolution over time, Amy described a project Kantar undertook in 2018 to coincide with 100 years of most women getting the vote. The company took space in Soho for a fortnight to hold an exhibition entitled ‘What women want’. “We curated an exhibition depicting 100 years of advertising to women. We had sessions where it was open to a fascinated public and used the space for client events. The exhibition also provided a base for thought leadership work on the role that brands play in empowering women. It looked at their changing roles and the growth of confidence and self-esteem”. We were uncertain if this work is already in the Archive, but it is publicly available and there is every hope it can add immeasurably to the large amount of data on women’s roles already in the collections.
Amy is involved in charitable work as a trustee of Re-engage, which aims to alleviate loneliness and isolation in older people. AMSR has been a registered Charity since the early days of its inception. But it is unlike many other charities and I asked Amy how she views its position in the charitable arena, “I see it in the educational and continuous training space”, a view shared in AMSR’s vision.
People often say ‘wow’, when they start delving into the Archive.
So thanks to Amy and her fellow research leaders who support us in so many ways to help the Archive become the go-to repository of research insight history and information.
AMSR Goes To Events
Adam Phillips attended an eve of Election Event hosted by King’s College London and The Policy Institute.
The pre- Election /post-Election Event at Bush House was constructed around the release of the Exit Poll at 10pm on General Election night. About 150 individuals working in policy, journalism, academia, government and polling had assembled on the top floor of Bush House to listen to a selection of leading experts and influencers talking about how the election had gone and the issues that would be facing the new Government. There were also 1,000 who had signed up to watch the event online.
The event started at 19:00 with drinks and canapes. There was a break halfway through the evening for more substantial food before the Exit Poll results were announced. The second panel of the evening discussed issues that would be facing the incoming Government. At each stage there was lots of time allowed for questions from the floor. The aim was to provide as balanced a non-partisan summary as possible of the issues discussed, and not discussed, in the run up to the Election and the key issues, concerns and timetable for the incoming Government. It was a stimulating evening that usefully filled the gap between the end of the working day and the first results coming in. I left for home at 11:30pm. Many of the audience and speakers were going on to post-election parties.
There is a summary and full recording of the event on the King’s College website.
MRS Storytelling Conference
Pail Gebara, Joe Murat, Judith Staig and Phyllis Vangelder were at the Conference on 13 June
Stories are of course a bedrock of research, and it was interesting to see the different stakeholders the MRS had brought together to illustrate. this. There can be several agents in the storytelling process: presentations and reports to clients; advertisements and promotions to consumers; internal company communications, and interestingly, as illustrated in some of the presentations, consumers to researchers.
Grant Feller chaired the Seminar with skill and sensitivity. He chaired the opening panel of leaders in research and media looking at the latest trends in storytelling. The most important advice to emerge, when your facts and figures turn into stories, was the familiar, ‘keep it simple’. (Remember Ehrenberg’s Data Reduction?)
Two presentations in particular, illustrated the way consumers can tell the stories. The Triumph and BAMM account of a Sloggi research project showed how a participant-led ethnographic approach captured the stories of consumers outside the binary world. From the word go consumers and clients were brought into the processes.
Kate Skivington, Boxclever and Sarah Taylor, Boots. recounted how an immersive, consumer-centric approach to deepen understanding of the UK beauty market and ideas for activation involved beauty shopping groups from the start to the finish of the project.
While the development and recounting of stories is common to research, especially in qualitative approaches, several interesting techniques were illustrated. Segmentation is a methodology that easily lends itself to storytelling, but it is not always easy to remember the nuances of each segment or persona. Madano sharred its experience of harnessing new tools, such as AI, to create rich visual archetypes to boost the impact of segmentations.
Speakers from Magenta showed how discourse analysis can spotlight nuances from consumer language in interviews and focus groups. The power of metaphor was illustrated by a case from Chivas, showing it as a powerful tool to simplify intricate concepts.
The closing panel stressed that you can‘t tell evidence-led stories alone: persuasive data storytelling requires a collaborative approach.
Summing up Grant Feller spoke of the rawness and emotion embedded in storytelling. As the Conference showed, It is a great way to simplify complex issues and markets.
The Archive is very rich in stories, not only from the qualitative CRAM collection, but in the thousands of stories in the papers, reports and quantitative material such as TGI. We were able to talk to so many delegates about the Archive. During the tea break we demonstrated the Boots/teenage make-up study to delegates from Boots. Sam Walker from the Football Association, who commented during lunch that there wouldn’t be anything about sports, was amazed to find 1,404 items relating to sport, 738 specifically to football. And we spoke to delegates from Chivas about our collection of whisky reports – about 350 to date.
Like storytelling with its narrative arc, the Archive illuminates ’the past, now and next’.
MRS Conference on the Best of Events and Awards
Paul Gebara was in Manchester for the Conference on the Best of Events and Awards on 17 July which celebrated some of the most highly regarded research delivered by insight teams with a regional focus.
Better Statistics Inflation Seminar
Phyllis Vangelder was at the Seminar on 23 May 2024
The latest Better Statistics Seminar on Inflation issues explored the controversial topic ‘Are we using the right measures?’
The issue of inflation is of course high priority for politicians. It has also been the focus of research by AMSR volunteers looking at the rich amount of material on the subject in the Archive collections. A fascinating article by Phyllis Macfarlane in Book 3 in the series on ‘Showcasing the Archive’ Researching the public’ looked at inflation in an historical context: ’The great inflation: government policy in the 1990s and the impact on women’’. (incidentally, we were delighted to hear that Phyllis Macfarlane has been appointed to the National Statistics Expert Users Advisory Committee – NSEUAC).
The Seminar explored several issues from the perspectives of different stakeholders, e.g. Is it possible to have one Index when there are many different purposes? What next for HCI? Should one of the other measures replace the RPI instead of CPIH?
Tony Dent brought together a distinguished group of speakers to examine these questions. Ed Humpherson, Director General of the Office for Statistics Regulation, who gave the keynote paper on ‘Current regulatory issues in price statistics’, discussed some of the problems in moving away from the ‘basket of goods’ approach. How do you deal with scanner data from supermarkets? The notion of a digital economy must also be considered. He suggested that there are too many ways to describe inflation and there might be a problem in multiplicity.
What are we measuring?
Stephen Burgess, from the Office of National Statistics, looked at the landscape of the main inflation indices in the UK and examined the differences between CPIH, CPI and HCI .
Martin Weale, Professor of Economics at King’s Business School, stressed the importance of a democratic price index which measured the average rate of experienced inflation across different households.
It is also desirable that an index of inflation moves roughly in line with measures of well-being and an understanding of consumer behaviour.
Are there alternatives?
In a session on alternatives. Juliet Stone, Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, described work on a Decent Living Index (DLI), a needs-based approach to measuring inflation. Rather than measuring expenditure, this approach measures what people need to obtain a decent standard of living – the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society. (This brought back memories of being told very many years ago by Andrew Ehrenberg, that not having a television set was on the deprivation index – plus ça change).
Shaun Richards, an Economist and Journalist, pointed out that a Cost of Living Index such as HPI measures how people actually spend their money.
Is the governance right?
Geoff Tilly, Chief Economist at the TUC, stressed that official inflation measures should reflect dialogue between interested parties and have a nuanced structure that listens to public opinion.
Simon Briscoe, a Member of the Better Statistics Advisory Committee, was concerned with the issue of change in inflation indices. There was far too much reliance on technical theory. He questioned whether the measurement of inflation was best governed by having two separate advisory committees covering stakeholder and technical issues.
In the Open Forum on measurement and governance Vicky Pryce, also a Member of the Better Statistics Advisory Committee, pointed out that we rely on statistics to see what is happening to the economy.
Several other issues were explored e.g. should change in consumer behaviour due to inflation change the Index? Is it in fact better to have a readily understood index than a truly accurate one?
There was a consensus that inflation measures, and indeed all official indices, should be ‘for the public good, understandable and transparent.
This is not the first time that Better Statistics CIC has addressed the issue of inflation and links to previous inflation seminars and inflation issues over time can be found on www.betterstatsnet/inflation
Do look at the Better Statistics website for further details about this Seminar.
Recent Additions To The Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane’s regular column on some of the recent documents that are now online
Our focus is on growing usage, especially in education, so out of the large numbers of items that we scan, catalogue and upload each month I try to highlight those that we feel will especially appeal to academics with particular interest in modern history, focusing on topics such as everyday life, gender studies, the growth and application of advertising, the media and technology, etc.
From Alan’s Attic
We continue to scan and load material from Alan Hedges – over 400 reports now, covering a myriad of topics. We’ve recently catalogued a number of papers on the theory of advertising, from the 1970s, when the psychological underpinnings of advertising were very much under discussion. Three that caught my eye were: ‘How subliminal is your persuasion?’ (advertising effectiveness) by A G Davey, 1970 (1);‘The relationship of attitudes and behaviour’ by our very own Liz Nelson, 1969 (2), and ‘Fear: the potential of an appeal neglected by marketing’ by Ray Michael and William Wilkie 1970 (3). These will be very valuable to an undergraduate or master’s student writing about the development of advertising post WW2.
Then three more eclectic reports: ‘A report on the UK petrol market in 1971’ – brands, promotions, countries imported from (Iran!), taxation. Many brands which have disappeared – the market is more consolidated now. But a report that will be useful to anyone interested in the motoring market – or climate change – or the various energy crises of the last few decades (4). For the Sociology student we have a 1990 report on ‘Repeat attendance at group discussions – does it matter?’ by Wendy Hayward and John Rose at the Qualitative Consultancy. This gives a detailed discussion of the pros and cons (5).
And a report that caught my interest because I’m a great believer in the effect of Arts on Education: ‘Stories that sing – developing language through music: report on a pilot project in three Tower Hamlets primary schools with emphasis on children with English as a second language’ by Ann Blaber, CMW (Children’s Music Workshops), 1998 (6). This covers a pilot conducted for a three-year project to explore ways of using creative class music to enhance Key Stage 2 children’s understanding and use of language, with particular emphasis on children with English as a second language. The pilot, in three Tower Hamlets primary schools with a very high intake of Bengali children, combined composition, songwriting, storytelling and performance, and encouraged teachers to link the work with the Literacy Programme. It proved very successful, as demonstrated by this quote from one of the teachers: “There’s been an extraordinary improvement in some of the children’s confidence in speaking and asking questions”. I personally deplore the lack of Arts teaching in schools these days.
Anyone interested in the development of Habitat in the early ‘70s would do well to read Habitat qualitative research 1975 – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org) (7)
Then I have picked out three reports on food: ‘Exploring attitudes to GM food’ (8) ‘Local food: report on qualitative research’ (9) and ‘Local Food in Britain – a research review for CPRE (Council for the Preservation of Rural England)’ (10), which will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how our attitudes to food have changed.
Media Conferences from the 1990s
We are always trying to increase our content on media and have recently loaded four sets of conference papers from the nineties, contributed by Lawrence Bailey. And they are truly showstoppers: Media in the 1990s: the Geneva Summit Conference Papers, MRG (Media Research Group), 1991 (11) – with sessions labelled ‘The only constant is change’, ‘Media research – who wants the truth’ and ‘The future – adapt and thrive or struggle to survive’ and ending with Cocktails, Dinner and Discotheque in the Gala Ballroom – what’s not to like?
The first line of this next set of Papers is ‘Print is dead’! : The cutting edge of the media in the Nineties: the Amsterdam Summit Conference Papers, MRG (Media Research Group), 1993.(12). In Global Media Research: sharing opportunities and challenges around the world. ARF, 1995 (13) I recognise Sheila Byfield, John Clemens and Bruno Colin amongst the paper givers. And Readership Research Symposium 6, San Francisco April 1993 (14) includes papers from Didier Truchot, Alain Tessier, Erhard Meier, Pym Cornish, Guy Consterdine, Nigel Jacklin, Michael Brown…. It must have been quite an event! (Ed: It was! I was there!)
The Greater London Council (GLC)
We have also been lucky enough to receive a collection of materials from 1975 – 1986 relating to the GLC and particularly the abolition of the GLC.
To anyone who is interested in the history of the GLC, this set of documents is a gold mine as it covers quantitative work, several quantitative studies, the final day poll, consultations, research into the anti-abolition campaign advertising strategy, and copies of actual posters. The proposal to abolish the council was a thrilling fight: The Conservatives vs Ken Livingstone.
According to Wikipedia: “The GLC devoted £11 million to a three-pronged campaign focusing on press campaigning, advertising and parliamentary lobbying. The campaign sent Livingstone on a £845,000 party roadshow conference, in which he successfully convinced the Liberal and Social Democratic parties to oppose abolition. Using the slogan “say no to no say”, the GLC team publicly highlighted that if the Conservative’s proposals were passed, London would be the only capital city in Western Europe without a directly elected body. The GLC campaign proved successful, with polls indicating majority support among Londoners for retaining the Council, and on 29 March 1984, 20,000 public servants held a 24-hour strike in support. The government nevertheless remained committed to the cause of abolition. In order to become law, the bill had to have three readings in each of the Houses of Parliament and could have been defeated if it was voted down in any of the six readings. The third and final readings took place on 28 June 1984, passing the Local Government Act 1985 with 237 votes in favour and 217 against”. The GLC was formally abolished at midnight on 31 March 1986.
We have reports showing the ‘Attitudes of Londoners to the abolition’ conducted in January 1984, April 1984, May 1984, July 1984, Sept 1984, and other attitude surveys from 1983 and 1985 conducted by Harris Research and MORI, and the ‘Final day poll’ conducted March 22-24, 1986, showed 62% of Londoners disapproving of abolition: (30% of Conservative voters and 85% of Labour voters. (16% saying don’t know overall)). So, the Campaign was successful in the sense that Londoners were against it. But nevertheless, it didn’t matter. I thought that it was Ken Livingstone who said that ‘if voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it’. But I see it is generally attributed to Mark Twain. Though no-one really knows. History, eh? What do we learn?
References/links
- How subliminal is your persuasion? (advertising effectiveness) – Press cuttings and ephemera – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The relationship of attitudes and behaviour – Press cuttings and ephemera – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Fear: the potential of an appeal neglected by marketing – Press cuttings and ephemera – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The UK Petrol Market – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- We’ll meet again?. Repeat attendance at group discussions – does it matter? – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Stories that sing – developing language through music: report on a pilot project in 3 Tower Hamlets primary schools with emphasis on children with English as a second language – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Habitat qualitative research 1975 – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Exploring attitudes to GM food: final report – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Local food: report on qualitative research – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Local Food in Britain – a research review for CPRE (Council for the Preservation of Rural England) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Media in the 1990s: the Geneva Summit Conference Papers, MRG (Media Research Group), 30October – 2nd November 1991 – Conference Papers other than Market Research Society – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The cutting edge of the media in the Nineties: the Amsterdam Summit Conference Papers, MRG (Media Research Group), 10-13 November 1993 – Conference Papers other than Market Research Society – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Global Media Research: sharing opportunities and challenges around the world. Sixth annual Advertising Research Foundation Global Media Research Workshop, New York, May 18-19 1995 – Conference Papers other than Market Research Society – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Readership Research Symposium, San Francisco April 1993: session papers (Sessions 2 – 10) – Conference Papers other than Market Research Society – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
The reports for the GLC are not yet loaded. I shall include the links in the next Newsletter.
Newsletter No. 2, April 2024
Letter from the Editor
I never cease to be surprised at the range of coverage in our Archive. A friend was researching malaria prevention programmes and asked for help. Sadly, I told him I was unlikely to have any information. But, but lo and behold, there in our Archive, in the BBC World Service Collection, were papers by Graham Mytton: a 2004 media study in the Gambia, in connection with an anti-malaria education programme run by the Centre for Innovation against Malaria and the Gates Malaria Partnership. A further paper in February 2006 was based on ‘Qualitative research into malaria prevention in the Gambia’. And another paper by Graham in the Archive comments on ‘The power of radio: a 26-episode radio drama broadcast in the Gambia containing anti-malaria messages’. And there is also a paper by Angela Dawson, ‘Malaria and the Media: advocating health policy and practice in sub-Saharan Africa: a report of a baseline study undertaken in Nairobi, Kenya and the Gambia’ in 2005.
We always knew there were no borderlines to the subjects and issues which are covered by market and social research, but it is always gratifying to see this confirmed!
As part of AMSR’s Awareness Campaign we are talking to leaders of the industry, both about the market and social research industry in general and the role of the Archive within it. I recently caught up with James Endersby, Chief Executive of the award-winning strategic insight company Opinium, Founder of Significant Insights and incoming Chairman of The Market Research Society. Our interview is below. He has some very nice things to say about the Archive!
We are also trying to have a presence at relevant events. We are grateful to the MRS for letting us have a stand at its recent Conference. We were able to meet many delegates to demonstrate the value of the Archive to market research companies. There was tremendous buzz at the Conference and a palpable sense of excitement in the industry. Judith Staig and I report back, focusing particularly on AI and polling.
Phyllis Macfarlane reports as usual with her fascinating look at Latest Additions to the Archive. We also have a couple of articles which delve more fully into different aspects of our Collections: The complete story of the Market Research Development Fund Collection, and a personal appreciation from Ken Baker about Alan Hedges’ work on the development of Hampstead Heath.
We include a report from the Better Statistics Conference on Climate Change. We are very aware of the dependence of good market research practice on good statistics. We are fortunate that our President, Denise Lievesley, plays such an important role in this area. You are probably aware that that she was invited to conduct a Review of the UKSA last year, and we’re very happy to report that it and the Government response was published by the Cabinet Office on March 12th: Independent review of the UK Statistics Authority . Government Response. And she appeared before PACAC on the morning of March 12th – if you are interested you can watch it here. We congratulate Denise on her work – and you can also see a review of a paper she did in 1993 in Latest Additions. Her good work is clearly never done!
The AMSR Interview - James Endersby
As part of AMSR’s Awareness Campaign we are talking to leaders of the industry, both about the market and social research industry in general and the role of the Archive within it.
Phyllis Vangelder caught up with James Endersby, Chief Executive of the award-winning strategic insight company Opinium, Founder of Significant Insights and incoming Chairman of The Market Research Society.
I began by asking James what he means by his avowed wish ‘to knock the ball out of the park’. It’s evidently a sporting expression, probably American, meaning ‘to do the best you can’. In cricket terms this would mean a ‘six’. Applying the metaphor to market research, James means expanding our sector, having conversations where market research comes out in front. Giving researchers the confidence to feel their voices are heard in the boardroom. “We don’t have to be on the board, but the board should be research-literate……We don’t shout enough about what we provide. Modesty is great, but it can be harmful if you are too modest. ‘Insight’ is now part of the marketing vocabulary and it is very exciting that it drives every successful brand. But I do think we are becoming bolder, advocating the work we do in the wider marcoms space”.
James had previously worked in the Management Consultancy space and he compared the role of the researcher with that of the Management Consultant. The work researchers do is often of more value to companies, yet the latter can get far higher fees. James would like to see this imbalance redressed. “Value must be placed on insight. Most of the successful advertising and PR Awards are based on work that is crafted and optimised using market research. We need to drive an appreciation of our products and services. When we get to a place where we are valued, we can charge what we are worth”.
James Endersby joined the then start-up Opinium, an insight agency specialising in brand and communications, product development, customer insights and thought leadership in 2010 and he has grown his agency from a staff of 2 to the current 105. Most of its work is in the UK, though there has been considerable expansion overseas, most recently with teams in New York, Amsterdam and Cape Town. “It’s great to see your company grow”.
James beams with pleasure as he talks about the expansion of the sector. It has expanded by leaps and bounds since he first entered it and he has seen the increase of energy and excitement in the industry. “There’s a real buzz now. It was there before Covid, but now when people can go out and about, there are exciting conversations about expanding the sector and businesses: data analytics and insight are now integral components”.
MRS
We went on to talk about his forthcoming role as Chairman of The Market Research Society. What are the main issues he faces? “One of my biggest objectives is to help drive revenues”. He knows that this is one of his strengths. His own experience with Opinium means he understands how to drive the revenues of a similar size organisation. Membership of the MRS is a problem: “Many agencies are still not members. And we need many more client members. We really ought to tell clients about the value of membership”. He pointed out how much their research and insight teams could learn from attendance at Society training courses, seminars and conferences, using Codeline, and of course the value of building relationships. ”I want our members to talk to the client-side teams to inspire them to join. It is very important for our clients to be involved with the MRS”. James praises the work of the MRS in the public arena: “One of the brilliant things the MRS does is advocating for us as a sector. If you are going to be part of this vibrant sector you should join. Learning how to use the Archive could well be part of the induction for new members!”.
We talked about the collegiate culture of the pioneering researchers who had worked so tirelessly for the MRS and the development of the industry. James feels strongly that “We ride on the shoulders of our pioneers”.
AMSR
When our discussion turned to the role of AMSR in the research industry, it was a joy to hear James’ warm enthusiasm. His thoughtful Introductions to the three AMSR books showcasing the Archive, had emphasised the value of looking back. And he says “It would be crazy not to have an Archive!”.
“It’s phenomenal! AMSR has become a brand in itself. It is a short cut to credibility. It would be such a shame and a waste if research did not have an Archive – it would be such a loss of history: what we thought, what we did, as people and consumers. The presentation of our behaviour and feelings can be preserved through the vast amount of material in the Archive. And it is a fast track to brand awareness”.
James shares our concern about the low level of interest and involvement amongst many research and insight agencies. The Archive is becoming increasingly important in academia and hopefully in schools, but many in the research community have not realised the contribution it can make to strategic thinking. James teems with ideas for increasing awareness and interest in this target audience. The Archive needs to work with agencies in joint projects which show the value of its resources for instance, in TGI, branding histories, New Product Development, business development, strategic insight, quantitative and qualitative surveys. AMSR could help in structuring case histories and together they could produce a series of papers on topics and product areas, a synergy which would help agency teams and clients. “The Archive must be seen as a resource for research agencies as well as academics and schools”.
James’ wonderful idea, for AMSR to sponsor a special MRS Award, appears at the moment to be, very sadly, beyond our means. But other suggestions, to spread awareness to other organisations such as BIG or The British Polling Council, by means of papers and seminars. are certainly affordable. And he stressed the importance of disseminating the importance of the Archive to clients, perhaps using it as an induction for new recruits to the research teams. ”Clients rely on market research”.
“The Archive is priceless to our sector, but we have to get people involved”.
Young people
James is very active in charitable work. Last year in our Newsletter, we talked to him about Significant Insights, his platform for Young Researchers. He set this up in 2020 as a global platform for the market research industry to make our sector more accessible to young people. It publishes regular profile interviews of senior researchers (see AMSR Newsletter 1. 2023) and he has offered a regular column to AMSR. This we shall certainly take up. It is a wonderful opportunity to familiarise people about the Archive.
James’ concern about young people links with AMSR’s Schools Project. We already have Simple Guides, online and videos. We regularly send curated guides to schools on modern British History topics in the curriculum. And we plan to do the same for politics and sociology. James would like to see ‘market research’ as a destination career and he feels that providing resources for schools can only encourage this mindset. But he believes that the schools’ system is tightly controlled, and it is a case for advocacy and contacts in the right departments.
An Insight Legend
James was recently named as one of ESOMAR’s ‘250 Insight Legends’, adding to the array of awards received by Opinium. He puts the agency’s success down to the brilliant people he employs. “There is a culture to celebrate success”. But it must be inspired by his leadership and creative energy. The Market Research Society is fortunate in their next Chairman. And we in AMSR are lucky that he ‘gets us’.
AMSR goes to events
As part of the ‘Awareness campaign AMSR volunteers are attending appropriate events to spread the message of the value of the Archive as a source of information
MRS Conference 2024: Applied Transformation
When I talked to James Endersby about the MRS (see Interview above) he was very excited about the increasing buzz and enthusiasm in the MRS. This was palpable at the Conference.
Phyllis Vangelder, John Kelly, Jim Whaley and Joe Murat
The MRS very kindly let us have a stand at the Conference. It was manned by Paul Gebara, John Kelly and Joe Murat and had a steady stream of delegates eager to learn more about the Archive. Judith Staig and Phyllis Vangelder were also there, talking to the researchers and taking in some of the sessions. They looked particularly at two major topics. which are so salient for the sector: AI and polling.
Judith Staig writes
Yet again, a keynote speech at the MRS conference highlights the need to look to the past to make sense of the present. Pippa Crerar, political editor at The Guardian, opened the conference by comparing today’s political environment in this election year with that of 1997 when Labour won a landslide victory. The research and polling data of the time showed that Labour was trusted by more than 80% of the public. She contrasted that with a recent Ipsos poll in which, “only 9% of voters said that they trusted politicians to tell the truth, which is the lowest it’s been since we started asking the question in 1983”. It’s heartening to know that the corresponding figure for pollsters is 45% which, although still a minority, is a ringing endorsement by comparison.
Trust in government is volatile in this country but Pippa Crerar highlighted one constant, which is that a change in government is always accompanied by a boost in trust, whereas a victory for the incumbent is not. She asserted that lack of trust is a problem for democracy as politicians lack the buy-in they need to make difficult decisions and the public don’t feel engaged. There is also an argument that when trust is low, politicians are less likely to feel the need to behave with integrity – this would certainly explain the number of political scandals we’ve seen in recent years.
Pippa has of course been instrumental in uncovering some of the scandals that have led to the erosion of public trust in the current government. She exposed Dominic Cummings’s daytrip to Barnard Castle and later brought Partygate to public attention using what she described as “old-school journalism” which involved knocking on doors and speaking to contacts; this sounds a lot like old-school market research too. Fortunately researchers don’t come across such blatant “obfuscation, denials and… lies” as she did when trying to verify her stories with Downing Street.
She went on to talk about the likely outcome of the forthcoming election and Labour’s chances. As an insider, she has access to the buzz at Westminster which says that although there are some in the Conservative party who feel it can be turned around, senior Tories think this is misplaced because the electorate isn’t listening. Starmer is positioning himself as trustworthy and reliable but has had to roll back on some key policy promises, such as the £28bn spend on green investment. And of course, there are more than two parties (as Phyllis Vangelder highlighted in AMSR’s latest publication Researching the Public: post-war policy, politics and polling). Pippa Crerar predicts an upsurge for the Lib Dems in previously safe Tory seats as well as Reform UK eating into votes on the right.
She closed with another look at the past: the election slogans and soundbites that have been shorthand for campaigns over the years from ‘Labour isn’t working’ in 1979 through ‘New Labour, new life for Britain’ in 1994, ‘Not flash, just Gordon’ in 2010 and more recently ‘Take back control’ and ‘Get Brexit done’, and predicted that perhaps we would see ‘No drama Starmer’ as Labour’s mantra for 2024.
As Bobby Duffy said, quoting Churchill, in the preface to Researching the public: post-war policy, politics and polling, “the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward”. Pippa Crerar’s keynote was a masterclass in the predictive value of comparison and historical context in the political arena. But even she couldn’t tell us exactly when the election will be.
Phyllis Vangelder writes
When I interviewed Ben Page, (Newsletter 28, Issue 3 2023) he was adamant that the survival of our sector depends on AI and we have to engage with it as a source of data.
In the keynote panel: ‘Insights revolution: navigating new horizons with generative AI’ the panellists, leading executives in research, shared experiences of using generative AI in their businesses and evaluated both the opportunities it presented as well as its limitations. They also considered the radical impact it will have on the market research sector.
Kelly Beaver, CEO Ipsos UK & Ireland, talked of the huge opportunities which were enabled by AI across product life cycles. One of the problems is that it is very good at tasks that many market researchers enjoy such as questionnaire design. There appears to be a disconnect in the way different people react to AI. Younger people and the general public appear to be anxious rather than excited about its potential impact. “There’s a real job for us to take the workforce and the general public with us on this transformation”.
Josh Muncke, Director of Retail, Consumer and Services at Faculty, believes AI can provide a clear vision of what we do. It can provide a feedback to help develop strategy and it helps us break down data to create new formulations.
Chris Lindsley, Global Insight and Analytics Director, Insights Centre of Excellence at Reckitt, talking from a client point of view, looked particularly at technology. He sees lots of boring jobs that people do not want to do, which could involve AI. A lot of that is frequent, repetitive but consistent datasets. AI has been embodied for some time in the company’s research and he is working with research agencies to discover its full potential, particularly in innovation and idea creation. “But the future is not yet here”.
Jatin Aythora, Director of Research & Development, BBC, stressed that the use of AI must be transparent. “The focus must be on the unique value it can deliver. There is a risk in using synthetic data. It is an opportunity to rethink the way business is run”.
There appeared to be a general consensus that the full potential of AI is not yet being utilised in the sector. Chris Lindsey feels it is not yet ready for ‘story-telling’.
Josh Muncke pointed out that although Generative AI could shorten and tighten the decision feedback loops between data and action, it is not yet working in more creative areas of the industry.
Whether for routine tasks or product development, it is apparent that Generative AI is transforming the sector and cannot be ignored. its potential is huge and its role within organisations must be managed effectively. Kelly Beaver believes there are important opportunities in training programmes, ““We need to be adapting to the way the research role is changing. All roles can be enhanced in some ways by AI. It is every researcher’s job to figure out what that is and make sure they are AI-enabled for the future”.
Synthetic respondents
A panel discussion later in the day, chaired by Colin Strong, Head of Behavioural Science at Ipsos, focused on synthetic respondents and asked, ‘Do we really need humans at all?’ The panel explored what opportunities synthetic respondents might offer and what assurances were needed to provide to clients before they become partners in this approach.
Researchers have long used forms of synthetic data in their modelling and analysis. Were new opportunities to incorporate synthetic data to research just an evolution of existing practice or a step change for the sector? Patrick Alcantara, Head of Insight at Axa suggested. “It’s about filling the gaps in insight. It’s an extension of things that we do”.
Rose Tomlins, Head of Brand and Consumer Insight at Virgin Money, believes that by interrogating synthetic data early, you can decide whether to progress before you get to the planning stage.
Keeping synthetic data up to date is a challenge as it has to reflect changes in real world events and infrastructure.
Debra Harding, Managing Director of the MRS, stressed, “In order to be able to create synthetic data you still need really, really good human data”. She does not see synthetic data replacing traditional techniques. “But the mix will be different and the way the research is undertaken will be different. And the need for people to continue to protect participants will continue to be an important part of research going forward”.
Climate Change and Better Statistics
Phyllis Vangelder attended the recent Better Statistics Conference
If you were complacent or laissez-faire or perhaps even a denialist about the state of changing climate, you might well have had a change of mindset listening to the broad range of informed and experienced speakers at the Better Statistics Seminar on Combating Climate Change on February 29th 2024.
Tony Dent had brought together an impressive list of speakers from establishment organisations like the Bank of England and the Office of National Statistics and several academic institutions, as well as more off-piste groups like the Green Alliance and Extinction Rebellion.
Key Speaker Professor Piers Forster, Chairman of the UK Climate Change Committee and Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, Leeds University, set the tone of the Conference with an erudite examination of the causes of climate change and climate feedbacks in the earth system to understand temperature and rainfall changes and improve their projections.
Statistics have an important role in disseminating accurate and transparent data, often to a confused audience. Ian Plewis, Emeritus Professor of Social Statistics, University of Manchester, is particularly interested in how statistics contribute to understanding the climate emergency, with especial reference to agriculture. He is concerned about the number of indicators which should be measured but are not, leading to several evidence gaps. Issues like uncertainty measures, changing emission factors and different response rates in different surveys lead to problems in interpreting different data.
Jill Poet, CEO, Organisation for Responsible Business, in a very clear and concise presentation, arguing for the interests of smaller businesses, pointed out that it is difficult to get statistics about what they are doing about climate change. And she stressed: “Statistics must be understood by people”.
The Conference ended with a video from Sir John Curtice in which he presented the results of a special survey conducted by Opinium Research on behalf of Better Statistics, with questions prepared by Sir John. The survey explores some of the political implications of the effects of climate change. Some key findings are:
At 32%, climate change is the third most mentioned issue of concern for respondents, behind the cost of living (75%) and immigration (39%). 50% say that climate change is mainly man-made.
Contrary to popular myth (but in line with other polling evidence) global warming is not an issue of greater concern to younger people than older people, nor are they more likely to accept that climate change is man-made.
Do go onto www.betterstats.net/global-warming for more information about the Conference and the survey.
Market Research Development Fund (MRDF) Collection: The complete story
Whilst the Archive holds a collection devoted to the work of the MRDF, and its final iteration the Research Development Foundation (RDF), the items in this collection do not tell the full story and contribution these bodies made to the development of the UK research sector over a period spanning two decades: the 1980/90s. To fill this gap, Peter Mouncey has written a comprehensive new Introduction which can be found within the MRDF collection at: (https://amsr.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p21050coll3/id/1240/rec/9).
This includes a table of references to where extensive additional material relating to MRDF/RDF activities can be found elsewhere in the Archive, including the reasons why a new body to undertake strategic research projects was considered a priority in the late 1970s, and the reasons behind a relaunch in the early 1990s as the RDF.
The members of the committees that ran these bodies represented the full spectrum of the sector: market and social research practitioners; academics; client-side researchers; research agencies; quantitative and qualitative backgrounds, varying over time depending on the focus of activities and experience required. They decided on topics for investigation and managed the resulting projects, and were all leading methodologists of the era, passionately concerned about identifying and investigating the challenges faced by the sector, devising solutions, and to sharing the knowledge that emanated from their work through seminars, conference presentations and papers published in the Journal of the Market Research Society. The new Introduction also describes how these bodies, and the projects, were funded.
In the existing MRDF Collection are items that go beyond the work of those two bodies. The reason is that they refer to how the output from MRDF/RDF work was embedded into the sector, and therefore this new Introduction also includes limited references to other work to provide a context and historical progression, especially related to the attitudes of the public to market research and participating in surveys.
Finally, the new Introduction concludes with the author’s selection of four projects that he feels made the most significant contribution to addressing strategic challenges facing the research sector over the life of the MRDF/RDF.
The Archive contains 18 items relating to the projects undertaken under the auspices of the MRDF and RDF. In general the model was to hold a Conference or Seminar followed by published papers of the Proceedings. The Collection includes many iconic papers including Colin McDonald’s study comparing face-to-face and telephone approaches, the experimental research on data fusion and investigating attitudes towards co-operation in research by the public and the business community.
Some of the other topics covered in the ‘80s and ‘90s were:
- Survey data and the law
- Employee attitude surveys
- Technical change
- Survey reliability and validity in qualitative research
- The role of research
- Research: Backroom or boardroom?
Peter Mouncey’s introduction provides a masterly account of the immense contribution of the MRDF and RDF to the challenges facing the research industry and the understanding of its methodological developments. As Tim Bowles , its first Chairman, pointed out, “The aim was to harness the creativity of researchers to provide findings which increase the cost-effectiveness and relevance of the research industry”.
Hampstead Heath
Anyone who has read our piece on Alan’s Attic (Newsletter No 26, Issue 1 2023) will know we have a wonderful collection of Alan Hedges’ research and consultancy work. Here, Ken Baker looks at his project on the development of Hampstead Heath
The Archive has been delighted to receive from the family of Alan Hedges a formidable series of reports covering a wide range of topics with which Alan was concerned. One in particular which may interest Londoners concerns his work in helping to design a management plan for the future of Hampstead Heath.
Hampstead Heath covers some 800 hilly acres of mown grass, scrub and rough woodland situated a few miles north of central London. It has long been a delightful area of recreational activities for Londoners and visitors from many parts of the world. In 1989 the Corporation of London became custodians of the Heath and produced a draft management plan. This was circulated amongst 48 stakeholders including English Heritage, Ecological Design Association, Woodland Trust and Heath and Old Hampstead, as well as 849 individuals who applied for and received a copy of the draft plan. Alan’s role as a social and business researcher and consultant, was to assess the impact of this draft via a questionnaire. In total the sample size for the results was nearly 900. The vast majority (90%) of individuals lived within five miles of the Heath. The findings were then used to modify the draft plan accordingly, and the final management plan was presented. In general, there was enormous affection for the Heath as it was, and the changes where existed tended to relate to the preservation of trees rather than their removal.
Two major themes tended to dominate the final strategy:
- Preservation and enhancement of the natural aspects of the Heath and its ecology. Protecting the flora and fauna and encouraging natural development.
- Preservation and enhancement of the Heath as an open space for enjoyment and prevention of encroachment and any developments which could adversely affect any part of the Heath. What follows is an ecological masterclass (written over 30 years ago) in which Alan examines different aspects of the Heath’s environment and details methods by which the desired results can be attained. For example: open canopy woodland is preferred to closed canopy, both for the ramblers and/or flora and fauna which thrive in the sunlight hence potential invasive species such as sycamore trees can be controlled by selective seeding, thinning and coppicing. Scrub, which consists of shrubs and young trees similarly needs controlling before coming invasive.
The plan is detailed in covering all environmental aspects as well as the great range of activities pursued by the visitors of which fishing, swimming, cycling and horse riding are just a few examples. Any reader would be content that if these plans were carried out, the future of that priceless area of open heath would be secure.
Latest Additions
Phyllis Macfarlane picks out some interesting new additions to the Archive
From Alan Hedges’ Attic
We continue to add more reports from Alan Hedges. Three that I particularly liked are:
‘A Motivational Study of Sweet Eating from 1968 ‘(1). An interesting quantitative and multivariate attempt to discover what motivates people to snack count-line (filled chocolate covered bar) chocolates.
Being a great eater of chocolate myself I was fascinated to find that the study produced remarkably clear theory to explain the type of personality who is particularly attracted to sweets, and especially count-lines: easy going, sensitive, moody, slightly dis-ordered, liking excitement and stimulation, rather childish and lacking in self-control. (Generally true of me, I think, though I rather object to the ’slightly dis-ordered’ aspect of the description!). However, I was somewhat horrified by the statement that ‘minor brands within the market are particularly strongly dependent on the core group of heaviest eaters’. This shows what sort of role a smaller brand plays – tending to be used for variety by a heavy eater and not developing a fringe group of loyalists with minority tastes. Oh dear! (1)
Probably only too true. Even today!
Very much worth a read though – provided you don’t take it personally, of course.
‘Back to Nursing: A Report on a Qualitative Study of DHA’s and Former Nurses’ (2). This is a study among ex-nurses and NHS management about returning to nursing after a break and the barriers to doing so – one rather thinks that things are probably not much different now!
‘Behavioural Response to Evidence Requirements: A study for the Benefits Agency’ (1999) about whether putting the responsibility on benefits claimants to provide evidence and complete forms for benefits frees up Benefits Agency staff time and therefore increases productivity – initial findings suggest not! (3)
All these reports would be terrifically valuable reading for anyone embarking on research into similar topics in 2024.
Kindly donated by Kantar
Contributing to our call for more modern research, four reports from their TNS UK ‘Cracking the customer code’ series on Chain Restaurants, Home Media, Utilities and Fuel.
To understand more about customer experience, TNS UK conducted a multi-category quantitative study among 4,000 consumers. It was based on TNS proprietary methodologies to explore Customer experience (TNS TRI*M), Brand equity and growth potential (TNS Conversion Model), and Brand positioning. (TNS Need Scope). Fieldwork was conducted in April 2014 with small scale qualitative work in support.
The research covered 12 restaurant chains: Bella Italia, Brewers Fayre, Burger King, Café Rouge, Frankie & Benny’s, Harvester, McDonalds, Nando’s, Pizza Express, Pizza Hut, Prezzo and J D Wetherspoon. Nando’s and Prezzo are specifically covered in the report, both performing well on customer experience but Nando’s showing greater opportunity for growth. (4)
The home media brands covered were: ВТ, Plusnet, Sky, ЕЕ, TalkTalk and Virgin. BT and Plusnet are highlighted in this particular report – with Plusnet significantly out-performing BT. (5)
npower and First Utility are highlighted in the Utilities report and Shell and BP in the Fuel report. (Shell showing advantage) (6) (7)
Four other reports from Kantar are: ‘The future of payments’ (8) from 2013, which reveals now many methods of payment we each use (lots!) and whether things will simplify in the future; ‘Green shoots: how to grow your green credentials’ (9); ‘Environment and climate change’ (10): which draws on two studies undertaken in 2012 by TNS Opinion and Social for the European Commission: ‘Attitudes of European Citizens towards the Environment ‘(Special Eurobarometer 365) and ’Climate Change’ (Special Eurobarometer 372). The results are encouraging. It could be useful to compare them with current data.
And ‘Are the wheels coming off for Generation Y? ‘(11) – an interesting survey (from 2013) of Gen X and Gen Y consumers to see if Gen Y consumers really are going to be different from Gen X in their requirements of the Auto market. It seems that the industry need not worry too much – the findings are encouraging!
IJMR Landmark Papers (See also the article above about the MRDF)
We are also in the process of loading a series of reviews of IJMR ‘Landmark papers’ by Peter Mouncey, in which he selects an iconic paper from the past and gives us a thoughtful take on it – covering both its context, history and current relevance. So far we have loaded 11, and there are more to come, but I have just highlighted four here to demonstrate the variety of subjects and authors covered:
‘The effect of clustering on costs and sampling errors of random samples’; by Paul Harris: Back in 1977, RPS (Random Probability Sampling) was not simply the ‘gold standard’, it was still routinely used across the market research sector. The paper examines the role that clustering can play in RPS-based survey design, a summary of clustering theory being included to set the scene and calculates the efficiencies of different designs. (12)
‘Role of the ESRC Data Archive in the dissemination of data for secondary analysis’ by Denise Lievesley; by 1993, the ESRC Archive based at the University of Essex was already 25 years old. The Archive did not own the data, but ‘holds and distributes them under licences held by site owners’. Its aim was to ‘preserve and disseminate machine-readable data’, with a catalogue of 3500 datasets. A key challenge described in the paper, is storing data in such a way that it will remain accessible over time, protected against technological change. However, the description of 8mm video and DAT audio tapes, cartridge tape drives, floppy discs and CD ROM formats demonstrate the difficulties in keeping archives technologically neutral! The way this was achieved at that time is described. (13)
‘Repositioning research: a new MR language model?’ by Virginia Valentine. The debate on relaunching market research was not new in 2002, and even then, the possibility of ditching the term market research was a hot topic. Virginia Valentine concentrates on how we communicate what we are or want to be – focusing on the language and imagery used in these communications. Not surprisingly, she turns to semiotics as a source of understanding, but as she stresses in her Introduction, “the paper is not about semiotics as such, but about the ‘vital importance of language in repositioning research’. (14)
‘The scope for reducing refusals in household surveys: an investigation based on transcripts of tape-recorded doorstep interactions’; by Patrick Sturgis and Pamela Campanelli. This paper focusses on one important source of non-response in random probability sampling surveys – refusals, and whether strategies could be developed to reduce the then current levels. The authors describe the findings from their experiment based on 353 tape recorded doorstep interactions, from two surveys conducted by SCPR (Family Resources Survey – FRS) and NOP (Political Tracking Survey – PTS), using 32 field interviewers in total. The PTS study was based on an electoral roll sample with pre-named individuals and ‘paper and pencil’ data collection, conducted in January 1996. The FRS study was conducted in March 1996 based on a sample drawn from the Postcode Address File with all adult members of the household being asked to participate. You’ll have to read the paper to find the answers – but one wonders if anyone would go to so much trouble today, even though response rates are even lower post pandemic. (15)
More to come
We have a lot more content waiting in line to be processed and uploaded, including more than 300 Alan Hedges’ reports. We continue to be amazed and grateful at the donations we receive. The flow shows no sign of abating, and it is of value to so many of our users, though it’s never easy to predict just how material will be used. If you still have material hanging about – do send it to us.
Links
- A motivational study of sweet eating: presentation document – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Back to Nursing: report on a qualitative study of DHAs (District Health Authorities) and former nurses – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Behavioural response to evidence requirements for IS (Income Support) and JSA (Job Seeker’s Allowance): report on a qualitative study – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Cracking the customer code: chain restaurants – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Cracking the customer code: home media – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Cracking the customer code: utilities – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Cracking the customer code: fuel – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The future of payments – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Green shoots: how to grow your green credentials – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Environment and climate change – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Are the wheels coming off for Generation Y? [research on cars] – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Landmark paper: ‘The effect of clustering on costs and sampling errors of random samples’ by Paul Harris – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Landmark paper: ‘Role of the ESRC Data Archive in the dissemination of data for secondary analysis’ by Denise Lievesley – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Landmark paper: ‘Repositioning research: a new MR language model’ by Virginia Valentine – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Landmark paper: `The scope for reducing refusals in household surveys: an investigation based on transcripts of tape recorded doorstep interactions’ by Patrick Sturgis and Pamela Campanelli – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Newsletter No. 1, 2024
Letter from the Editor
Many of you will be familiar with the distinction between people who are ‘radiators’ and those who are ‘drains’. I am Indebted to John Samuels who drew my attention to this insightful segmentation. He told me he had often used it to recruit new members of staff. ‘Drains’ are the people who wear you down: they are moany and pessimistic. ‘Radiators’ are people who radiate warmth (of course) and are enthusiastic and optimistic.
And I realised that AMSR has a band of volunteers who are ‘radiators’. They are good to be with because they are optimistic and enjoy what they are doling.
Call it ‘awareness’, ‘showcasing’ or ‘outreach’, AMSR is very aware of its mission to disseminate its value to users as widely as possible. We do this in many ways, for example, posts on social media as part of the ‘awareness campaign’ and attendance at seminars, conferences and academic fairs. We are very grateful to the MRS for letting us have stands at relevant conferences, enabling us to explain to members how we can help them with their insight and strategic marketing. We include an article describing some of the events we have attended recently, helping us not only to make people more aware of the Archive, but to explain its potential value to them as researchers in academia and business.
We have now firmed up the date for the next AMSR Event – a Summer Party on Monday 10 June 2024 at Bush House, the delightful venue we have enjoyed in previous years.
Following the announcement of Professor Claire Langhamer and Colin McDonald as new AMSR Trustees, in the last issue of the Newsletter, our interviews this month are with Claire and Colin. Judith Wardle has written a lovely article about her meeting with Claire Langhamer and I talked with Colin McDonald. They both Illustrate how researchers with different backgrounds find the Archive so fascinating.
A new volunteer, Amanda Claesens, describes her experience in discovering the Archive. Tony Dent contributes an article on the synergy between good statistics and research. Both Amanda and Tony write about fieldwork methods which were prevalent not so long ago.
And as usual Phyllis Macfarlane points to some of our recent additions. We have some fascinating new material including qualitative data from guru Mary Goodyear.
The AMSR Interviews
In this issue we talk with the recently appointed new Trustees, Professor Claire Langhamer and Colin McDonald
Judith Wardle meets Claire Langhamer
It was dusk as I walked across a Christmassy Russell Square, past the poster inviting people in to see Shakespeare’s First Folio. Senate House towered above me, a veritable tower of books. Apparently, during the war it was the Ministry of Information, very George Orwell, built in the ‘30s, and each drainpipe was adorned in gold with the date on which it was constructed. I was on my way to meet Professor Claire Langhamer who is our newest Trustee and Director of the Institute of Historical Research.
Claire became a historian through her studies at school. It was the subject she most enjoyed and had an aptitude for. Her degree at Manchester covered the span of history but she was drawn more and more towards recent history and felt a mission to focus on everyday realities and in particular to document women’s lives. Her dissertation investigated spinsters in the Victorian era, from the 1850s onwards, when there was huge concern about ‘the surplus women problem’, an imbalance between the numbers of men and women in the general population. When women’s lives were lived in the domestic sphere, there were concerns about what roles these women could have. What shall we do with our old maids? It led to some reclaiming of the language. It was said, ‘never be afraid to be an old maid, better to be single and useful than married and miserable’. In the 1890s, women’s lives, previously thought to be mundane and insignificant, were emerging as a worthwhile and fascinating subject for the historian to investigate and Claire needed no encouragement to go down that particular avenue. Her PhD looked at women’s leisure in the 20th century. As a result, an interest in love and courtship was sparked, which in turn led her to become interested in the history of emotions. Looking at history through the prism of emotion has proved immensely rewarding which is where the Mass Observation Archive comes in.
We are lucky that Claire is also a Trustee of Mass Observation, in some ways a sibling to our own Archive in the sense that it covers history in the 20th century. But as Claire pointed out, the two archives are very different and because of that, complement each other. Mass Observation is largely a collection of tales written by the protagonists themselves, often diaries, and famously observers of life during the Second World War. While their archive covers 1930s to the 1950s, there is also a Mass Observation Project, gathering data since 1981. Our documentation is written with a client in view; most of what we have was commissioned by public and private sector clients, with specific issues to address and questions to answer. There is a ‘tradiness’ and a practical utility to our collection which makes it unique. By ‘tradiness’ she means we come from the world of commerce and so our collection is particularly useful because the documents are authored and compiled with that perspective.
So much of our data is collected from women, particularly housewives, who held the domestic purse-strings, not a voice that is easily found elsewhere. There is no other collection of papers like it – not least because a researcher’s gaze is very different from, say, someone who compiles official documents or indeed gathers together their own papers for preservation. And as such, triangulating with other sources means it can be a missing link or the perspective that brings meaning to existing information.
Through working with Mass Obs Project, Claire has been able to work with people in prison, writing about their life stories and remarking upon their inner lives and their hitherto hidden creativities. We commented on the overlap between the approach of a qualitative researcher and a Mass Observer.
Claire related an inspiring example of how archives throw up tales of the past that can bring meaning to lives lived now. She discovered a series of essays written by schoolgirls in an elementary school in Bolton: simple subjects like, ‘what we did at Easter’ and ‘what I want to be when I grow up’. And when we say ‘discovered’, it was while looking for something else in that archive that she and her fellow author, Hester Barron, chanced upon this collection of essays. Such a common story and such a joy. These were girls destined for jobs in the local cotton mills, leaving school in their early teens and to many eyes their lives were of little consequence. And yet, their writing revealed keen observations and a depth of feeling that would otherwise have been lost. Claire and Hester Barron, were able to describe the lives of these girls that enriched our understanding of that era and did justice to their memory. Not only that, as authors and historians, they have been able to return to Bolton, find the essay writers’ descendants, discover what happened to them and so fill in so many valuable gaps in the history of that region, of that group of children and of the girls themselves.
So there was a meeting of minds when our Archive found Claire and she found our Archive. Phyllis Macfarlane was looking for academics to try the material out. Claire was wowed and subsequently pleased to be able to help a student looking for information about personal finances.
Claire sparkles with enthusiasm for her work. She seems to have all her antennae ready to pick up on those histories that reveal the processes and feelings around everyday life, for women especially. She is keen to build the Archive’s user base and forge new connections with others in the academic and archive world. If anything is missing (and that is an odd idea in that all archives have missing parts; they are what they are) it is perhaps the notes and proposals describing how the research was put together. Her enthusiasm reminded me once again of the value of our Archive – it is easy to get waylaid by the business of keeping the Archive going and forgetting the treasure trove that it is.
Read more about Claire on our web site at amsr.org.uk/who-we-are/
Talking with Colin
Colin McDonald has been involved as a highly active volunteer withAMSR since its inception in 2016. He talks here with Phyllis Vangelder.
We began by looking back. We had worked closely together in co-editing the ESOMAR Handbook of Market and Opinion Research in 1998, and we agreed that one of the most satisfying elements of volunteering for AMSR, was the opportunity it gave to re-unite with friends and colleagues from years ago.
Colin has been very involved, with others, in designing the ways in which the material in the Archive is organised, classified and designed in the catalogue. I asked him how he had first become a volunteer with AMSR: “I was approached by John Downham (he, Liz Nelson and Geoffrey Roughton were the three founder members). I was immediately attracted because I knew this was something I could do. My first job (well before getting into market research) was in the Printed Books Department of the British Museum, the forerunner of the British Library. I knew how catalogues worked and was comfortable with the idea of collecting material and classifying it. It is great to have something to do; and I must say it was a godsend during Covid. I discovered I had quite a good scanner attached to my printer and I took on quite a lot of scanning during that time. I am comfortable working alone and it structured the day very well”.
We talked about the way the Archive material has been divided into collections. Did that come from his experience at the British Museum? “No that is how OCLC, the organisation which hosts our Archive, works”. Colin enlarged on the way our association with OCLC (www.oclc.org) developed. “A Team comprising Raz Khan, Pat Molloy and others, had from the beginning looked at various possible solutions for hosting our online material. OCLC is an American-based, not-for-profit organisation which supplies worldwide library services. When we started, we thought of our objectives mostly in terms of preserving what was in danger of being lost; the idea of digitising it with free on-line access came later, although some, especially Liz Nelson, argued strongly for it from the first. OCLC appeared to be the most economical host and one of its services, ContentDM, suited our needs. It is an online access platform on which people can upload and curate their own digital material. The concept of collections comes from ContentDM: the first thing you do when uploading material is to choose which collection to put it in, or if necessary, start a new one. You can’t just have a great wodge of material without attempting to divide it up into sensible groups. We currently have 38 collections, and archive users can search within or across these, either by word searching or by using our very comprehensive Index, or of course both.
“We believe you have to train yourself to use an archive. Of course, we have to help users, particularly schoolchildren, as much as we can. But we can’t hold people’s hands all the time. Using archives and searching information sources are skills you need to learn as a researcher. And finding your way around any archive, including this one, is bound to take some time and effort.
“I decided from the beginning, that we had to classify our material according to the type of document it was and that this should be the default basis for our collections: for example, an item could be a stand-alone paper or offprint, a book of conference papers, a research report, a newsletter, and so on. It’s tempting to define collections according to subject or topic, but that simply doesn’t work for our type of material because so many of the items we get cover a range of different topics: it is far better to deal with that by indexing, where the same item can be described in different ways.
“In addition, and cutting across this default, we have a number of special collections whose contents need to be shown together because they tell a distinctive story: these include collections which have been sponsored and/or specially curated for us by particular people or organisations. Examples are the two BBC collections, Market Research Abstracts, Market Research Development Fund (MRDF later RDF) publications, Research International, or the Ehrenberg/Goodhardt papers and reports which I hope will be augmented by the research papers from the University of South Australia which runs the Ehrenberg Foundation. I don’t mind how many special collections we have so long as they make sense”.
How does Colin feel about companies sponsoring collections. perhaps in return for a donation to the Archive. “There’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve already got an RI collection. It might be an incentive for companies to donate their material and give themselves a place in the history of the industry”.
”I don’t see Modern Collections as a separate category. I am not happy with the terminology of ‘Modern Collections’ sitting alongside our ‘Heritage Collections’. ‘Modern’ is not definable (as we see in the art world). What is Modern? Where do you draw the line? ‘Modern’ has for example been defined as history covering the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. But these already form by far the greatest part of our collections, so if that’s what the term means, what’s the point? Alternatively, ‘modern’ may mean whatever is of current interest. But the Archive is not static; it’s organic, and changes the balance of its content as it grows. We may decide something is modern now. But in 20 or 50 years’ time it won’t be. More importantly, once you categorise any particular subject matter as ‘modern’ you immediately imply (whether you mean to or not) that it is different from the rest, which is therefore ‘othered’. ‘mere’ history, `old hat’, dated. But our whole Archive is a historical record. We don’t want to suggest that the past is a different place. As Ben Page I believe has said, most things don’t change all that much. To understand the present, one can never ignore the past. In fact, we have a lot of post-millennium material that is coming in regularly and growing all the time. And, after all, almost every item in the Archive is dated, and those dates are key variables, and it is as simple as it can be for users to order the material by date and pick the date ranges or specific years which interest them”.
Colin sees our Archive as a gateway to information about market and social research. “If we don’t have it we should be able to point people to relevant sources which are also freely accessible – therefore we have a hub, being developed all the time, which takes people to websites where people can access journals and other sources which AMSR, for various reasons, cannot directly cover”.
We went on to talk about our target users. Colin agrees that academics are vital users, but lays great stress on the commercial sector, including insights, research agencies, advertising and media. “We have a great deal of data for instance on how advertising works, we have TGI, numerous papers on new product development, case histories and an increasing number of qualitative studies. There is a myriad of data which can help ad agencies, for example, in their current and future work”. How do we disseminate this material? “We can perhaps get volunteers to develop subject areas and write short papers. I know Phyllis Macfarlane is working on this”.
We talked about succession. Although we love working with the Archive, we can’t go on for ever. How do you attract younger people with the same enthusiasm? Colin thinks the approach we have just been discussing, getting people to develop the areas in which they are interested, is the way forward.
“We were so excited at building something new. I hope that the people coming in as AMSR volunteers now will experience the same enthusiasm and sense of excitement we were lucky enough to have”.
Read more about Colin on our web site at amsr.org.uk/who-we-are/
AMSR goes to events
Senate House Library/Institute of Historical Research
History Day
In November, Judith Wardle, Joe Murat and Phyllis Vangelder attended History Day at Senate House Library, University of London.
Phyllis Vangelder writes:
This was a worthwhile day from so many aspects.
We were one of about 60 stands, mostly archives of all types; some we knew well, some we had heard of, some were hitherto unknown to us, but there was a sense of a ‘family of archives’ and we learned a lot talking to people from the various organisations.
Among the familiar ones was Mass Observation and we confirmed our interest in holding another joint Webinar. They are asking for people who have used both Archives to get in touch.
We revived our relationship with the Churchill Archives Centre, which holds the Mark Abrams Archive. We have every hope of a joint project whereby we digitise the material. If we work together, we could perhaps get a grant or sponsors.
Other familiar Archives were The Institute of Historical Research, The National Archives; the Royal Historical Society, LSE Library; British Records Association; Digital Humanities Hub; Archives Hub and Library Hub. We also spoke, inter al, to people on the stands from university libraries in London. And we had a lot of graduate students coming to our stand.
Joe Murat, Judith Wardle and I were there from 11.30 to 16.00 and there was non-stop interaction with stallholders, researchers and others with an interest in historical research.
Senate House issued this press release about History Day and it was good to be quoted!
“On 23 November, Senate House Library and the Institute of Historical Research hosted History Day 2023. It is a free annual event bringing together students, researchers and anyone with an interest in history with collections professionals from galleries, libraries, archives, museums and research organisations.
This year 64 organisations joined us to celebrate and explore library, museum, archive and history collections from across the UK and beyond. After being held online-only for the past few years, the event was held in-person on the ground and first floors of Senate House for the first time since 2019.
The event opened with a session on ‘Discovering Historical collections’, chaired by Neil Stewart, Head of IHR Library and Digital, and featuring panellists from The National Archives, Archives Portal Europe, Community Archives and Heritage Group and the IHR’s own Bibliography of British and Irish History.
After the session, attendees were invited to browse the History Day fair, where they were given the opportunity to connect and discuss their research ideas with information professionals showcasing their collections. Judging by the feedback, the event was a great success:
“Everyone on our team enjoyed themselves and we had some great chats with researchers” – Florence Dall (Archives Officer, Queen Mary University of London).
“We made a lot of contacts both with people from the Archives world and history researchers” – Phyllis Vangelder (Trustee of the Archive of Market and Social Research and Editor of its quarterly Newsletter).
Although this year’s History Day is now over, you can still explore history collections across the country at the Discover Collections gallery, or by visiting the History Day 2023 playlist.
Next year History Day celebrates its 10th anniversary. Join the History Day mailing list to hear about future events”.
MRS Conferences and Seminars
We are grateful to the MRS for letting us have stands at relevant conferences, to demonstrate the Archive and explain the value of its contents to researchers of all kinds.
Generation Z
In October, Judith Staig, Joe Murat and Phyllis Vangelder attended the Gen Z Summit.
What makes this Generation tick? In addition to specifics such as its focus on inclusivity and authenticity, it has experienced the challenges of growing up amid the pandemic and cost-living crises. But not everything is generational. Some attitudes are simply down to life stage and experience (or lack of it). There are other factors in defining people in this cohort that could be more important than age group such as equality, geography and intersectionality. The concerns of this generation are not so different as those of other generations.
We were intrigued that a case history for Sneak Energy Drink was presented. The marketing of Lucozade as an energy drink is one of the most interesting case histories we have developed from material in the Archive!
Owners and Leaders Conference
Paul Gebara attended this Conference on 23 November.
He writes:
“An amazing, thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile first conference of industry owners and leaders, with everyone sharing their experiences and being open and transparent with the information they gave.
The Conference, co-chaired by James Endersby (Opinium), and Sinead Jefferies (Zappi), was a very involved and lively day, with a mixture of presentations, panels, storytelling experiences-successes, pitfalls to be aware of/avoid, to the workforce growth, Gen-Z, how to address them, to round table discussions.
The Conference started with a great presentation and panel discussion about how to raise your company’s appeal for a prospective sell – the positives, successes, and the pitfalls to avoid. One investor uses ‘Glassdoor’ ratings, an on-line evaluation of company reputations, as part of its decision process on the acquisition.
Steve Phillips (Founder & CEO Zappi) presented his company’s story as he had raised significant funds (3 times) by selling a percentage share of the company, and in the process, growing the number of employees exponentially and too fast, and how to avoid such pitfalls.
The afternoon started with a fantastic discussion on ‘workstyle’ (autonomous working) by Lizzie Penny & Alex Hurst (Cofounders & Joint owners of Hoxby) followed by looking at culture, talent, leadership, and understanding the issues by Pam Armstrong (Partner of Daughters of Sailors), to the Gen-Z era roundtable by Jane Rudling (MD – Walnut Unlimited).
I felt the conference really helped bring together industry owners and leaders, opening up opportunities to offer free support/guidance. It was a great opportunity to meet colleagues that I have worked with/met online only and to meet new people, and introduce them to AMSR”.
2024 will be another busy year for AMSR
HAP 24
‘History and Archives in Practice’ is where historians and archivists come together to consider shared interests in archive collections, their interpretation and use. HAP is a partnership of The National Archives, Royal Historical Society, and the Institute of Historical Research and our attention was drawn to this by our new Trustee Claire Langhamer. Next year’s Conference is at Cardiff University on 6 March 2024. We shall certainly have a presence at this Conference, we shall have a stand and the opportunity to meet historians and delegates from other archives.
MRS Conference 12 March 2024
The theme of the Conference is: ‘Applied transformation: thriving in the new now’. We hope to have a stand at the Conference and talk to attendees about AMSR. The theme has many resonances with the material in the Archive, which examines the past to illuminate current and future trends.
Discovering the archive
Amanda Claesens writes
I stumbled across AMSR during the MRS Annual Conference when it moved online during Covid. The joy of being able to catch up on all the discussions at my leisure meant that one afternoon I found myself watching a presentation from AMSR. As a market researcher of 25+ years, the thought of being able to access a website full of data from years gone by appealed immensely. I made a mental note to get in touch ‘at some point’ to offer myself as a volunteer.
Fast forward to the summer of 2023 and I finally got in touch, and then a small jump to now and I’m actually putting pen to paper to talk about what I’ve found.
As Phyllis Macfarlane commented when she wrote in the AMSR Newsletter about ‘Latest Additions’ in Jan 2023 – I can’t believe that in 1928 they conducted and analysed over 20,000 interviews: face-to-face, with pen and paper. and without any survey analysis software. Can you imagine the project management involved?
I’ve worked with clients in the publishing world my whole career. 20 years ago the Royal Mail would deliver 5 postage sacks full of survey replies on a daily basis, giving us insights into the habits of magazine readers from Today’s Golfer to MOJO to Grazia, so I’ve an absolute soft spot for readership data.
Both 1928 and 1934 reports have figures for some of the brands we still recognise today – Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Homes & Gardens, Woman, Woman & Home and Red (as an aside there was also a Violet magazine and a Blue magazine – each read by fewer than 1% of the sample in 1928).
I’d love to have been around to read Merry or Sunny or Happy and I wonder how we’d feel today about the content of Modern Woman. And don’t get me started on Wife & Home.
The 1934 report has moved away from the 1928 categorisations of “middle, lower-middle and working class” and instead uses Class A, Class B and Class C.
It explains “In dividing the families inhabiting the four areas investigated into Classes A, B and C, as a guide to their purchasing power, the governing factor has been the number of rooms occupied by each. Families occupying houses of 8 or more rooms have been placed in Class A, those occupying houses of 6 or 7 rooms in Class B, and those occupying houses of 5 rooms or fewer in Class C”.
It then goes on to say “In classifying the families upon which they called, investigators were instructed to take into consideration not only the size of the house occupied, but the family’s apparent social standing and purchasing power. This instruction was given more especially in order to prevent the wrong classification of families with A Class incomes which occupy houses with fewer than 8 rooms”.
The beginnings of ABC1 classifications no doubt. Although Wikipedia states that they were developed in the late 1950s. I feel another rabbit hole approaching …
To anyone thinking “ooh I fancy a look” I thoroughly recommend it, but be warned, you’ll likely lose days discovering all kinds of long-lost stats.
Urgent! Volunteers required
Christine Eborall writes
The Archive needs more volunteers to help with cataloguing and/or indexing incoming material. These are important tasks because they are key to future users being able to make sense of the Archive and find what they want.
Cataloguing involves recording the publication details of each document, while indexing is similar to coding and involves classifying the contents of each document in terms of the research methodology used, the topics under discussion, the business context of the research and the geographical area it covers.
Cataloguers work from home and record the above information in an excel spreadsheet. Another cataloguer checks their work and then it’s all uploaded to the online Archive.
Volunteers use their own computer and need reliable internet access for uploading and downloading documents. Full training will be provided, plus Adobe Pro software if necessary.
This would suit volunteers who are organised, like looking at detail and looking back over old research reports, many of which are fascinating. You need to be able to set aside a chunk of time to work on it rather than odd moments, as it’s easy to lose track of where you were.
Please e-mail us referencing ‘Volunteering for Cataloguing and Indexing’ in the title if you would like to know more.
MRS Newsletters
Colin McDonald writes
Anyone interested in contemporary views of social history will find it well worthwhile to browse through the MRS Newsletters covering their period. These started being produced in mid-1966 and expanded during the ‘70s and ‘80s to include conference reports and articles discussing issues of the day. For example, around the time of the general election of February 1974 (which produced a hung parliament) you can find extensive discussions of opinion polling and its relevance to elections by the likes of Roger Jowell (Nov 1973), John Barter (June 1974) and Norman Webb (July 1974).
In October 1972, John Bound wrote about the report of the Younger Committee on Privacy; in December 1973, Michael Dowdall on Unilever’s view on international marketing; in July 1974, Bob Worcester on ‘Changing values and social trends’.
You can also find key findings from recently published surveys, information which will mostly be lost to us now. The Newsletter started publishing these in 1969 and it later became the ‘current awareness service’. Examples are: housing conditions in Greater London (Feb 1972; a summary of a GLC report); in January 1973, What people eat (BMRB’s National menu Survey); Children’s awareness of television (Independent Broadcasting Authority survey); Graduates’ dissatisfaction with their jobs (British Institute of Management survey); and whether people think women get a fair deal in pay (an ORC survey); in April 1973, attitudes to abortion (a survey by Gallup for SPUC), and whether people approve of the country going metric (a survey by NOP in 1972 – most people approved); in June 1973; research into hypothermia and its causes and effects (by ORC, reported in the British Medical Journal).
In November 1973, you could even read from a German survey about the popularity of garden gnomes in Germany.
Sadly, we are still missing some issues of the Newsletter. Can anyone help?
- 1 and 2 Before June 1966
- 13 April 1967
- 15-17 June-August 1967
- 19-34 Oct 1967 – January 1969
- 38-40 May-July 1969
- 42 Sept 1969
- 44-45 Nov-Dec 1969
- 47 Feb 1970
- 49 April 1970
- 52 July 1970
- 54 Sept 1970
- 58 Jan 1971
- 60-67 March-Oct 1971
- 69, 70 Dec 71, Jan 72
- 73, 74 Apr-May 72
- 76-78 July-Sept 72
- 86-91 May-Oct 73
- 96-99 March-June 1974
- 104 Nov 1974
- 159 July 1979
Adding to the Archive – does better statistics have a role?
Tony Dent, Director of Better Statistics CIC, writes
The Editor of this excellent Newsletter had asked if I might contribute a short piece and, ever anxious for the publicity, I enthusiastically agreed. Then I thought – what is the Archive about and what is the possible interest of the users of the Archive in Better Statistics?
Well, the value of the Archive is evident for all to see. It provides an interesting historical record, that can assist future historians to understand facts about our past, as well as, occasionally, offering up amusing anecdotes for those of us of a certain age, who can recall the events described. I would therefore declare that its real value lies in the veracity of the contents and the fact that, in the main, the picture of our society recorded by the research done in the past can be accepted as a truthful record.
Originally, of course, all the serious consumer research relied upon genuine random selection procedures for contacting households and something equivalent to the Kisch grid would be used to select an eligible person within the household. The interviews were always conducted face-to-face using trained interviewers especially briefed for each survey. With generous time allowed for the field workers to call on households, response rates were high and the results could be claimed to be fully representative of the population.
Then researchers started to use the telephone as the medium for data collection. Of course, this was originally through landline only and did not cover the total population, but researchers knew that and, generally, did not assume that the results were fully representative of the population of the UK unless boosted by some personal interviewing. Then, gradually, quota sampling replaced random sampling and the assumption grew that someone within a 3 or 4 band profile (sex, age, region and maybe ‘social class’) could be considered as a representative of that ‘group’ and that, provided you had at least 40 such ‘representatives’, you could assume the total for the group was accurate to represent the ‘universe’.
This methodology of relying on quota controls and weighting the results to the total population, with adjustments for past behaviour, took a serious knock in the 1992 election, when the opinion polls failed to reflect the actual result. Despite that difficulty, the underlying processes remain with us to this day and I believe that researchers have consistently failed to take full note of the influence that fieldwork time has on the results. Proper random sampling had given way to quota sampling because of the requirement for quick results and the desire to save money, so the surveys were not representative of those persons who spent significant periods out of their home. The quotas were being filled by the stay-at-homes, particularly the elderly stay-at-homes; a factor that continues to influence telephone surveys today despite the increased use of mobile telephone samples.
But at least with telephone interviewing we still had trained interviewers to ensure a consistency of understanding the questions being asked of people. With the increased use of ‘online’ research we are not only getting the most ‘available’ respondents completing the surveys, we are also getting them interpreting the questions as they see them! Moreover, our society is now much more diverse than 30 or so years ago, so we need more careful research, not simplistic methods, if we are to produce data that truly reflects today’s society for tomorrow’s archivists.
So, to make a long story short, Better Statistics is about putting better standards into our research and our National Statistics, to make them more trustworthy in reflecting the whole of today’s society. Hopefully, that will ensure that the Archive of today’s research will provide an accurate guide for tomorrow’s historians.
Please note that Better Statistics is a Community Interest Company and we believe that we are of interest to the community that supports the Archive. Full details about Better Statistics are available on the website and I suggest a review of our recent meeting on the Future of UKSA (link) (United Kingdom Statistics Authority) to get a flavour of our events.
Latest additions to the Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane writes
We are busy catching up with all our content donations. A selection of recently uploaded content includes:
From Mary Goodyear
Coca-Cola Qualitative reports done by Market Behaviour Limited in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. These studies were done in Romania and the Czech Republic, in the years shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union. Although the client was Coca-Cola, these projects cover much more than eating and drinking habits: they investigate, in depth, peoples’ attitudes to all sorts of social issues, problems of living in the `new’ society, attitudes to the West etc. Coca-Cola Carpathian Region: overview Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Advertising in West Africa: a similar study from MBL in West Africa, done for British Caledonian Airways in the 1980s. Ad Africa: West African reactions to advertising: a research project [on airline brands and services] – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
On the Move and on the Make: an amusing thought-piece from Mary that you will enjoy: On the move and on the make (a criticism of attitudes of young people applying for jobs in research) – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org) 1988
From Alan Hedges
Environmental Survey [road traffic] – A very comprehensive piece of 1972 qualitative work on the problems caused by road traffic, based on groups conducted mainly by Alan Hedges in various built-up parts of England. A salutary reminder of the problems that are largely still to be addressed. Environmental Survey (road traffic) – Motoring history – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Several 1960s Conference papers about food, focusing on the introduction and marketing of synthetic food substitutes. An interesting comparison with where we are now. Here’s the links to some – but there are more:
Own label: where now? – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Juvenile Theft: the causal factors: A critical review by AH of a 1977 book by William Belson.
Donated by Lynn Scrivener
A study into the potential impact of the Millennium Experience on UK tourism in the year 2000. This study, undertaken by the Research Department of the British Tourist Authority & English Tourist Board, was carried out in March 1998. The study was designed to provide an informed judgement on the likely impact of the Dome and was not an econometric forecast. With the benefit of hindsight, it makes fascinating reading!
More CRAM reports from the early ‘80s.
For those of you interested in Alcohol research I picked out three crackers, and another report on food:
Babycham Advertising Development: This is a classic of its time (1984). The background and objectives states that: 40% of all women drink Babycham and the regular ‘core’ users account for the bulk of the brand, hence it is of great importance that this sector is not alienated by advertising and other developments. That ‘40%’ is hard to believe nowadays isn’t it? Babycham Advertising Development (sparkling perry) – The CRAM Peter Cooper Collection – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Guinness in America: From 1984 – It’s hard to believe that this is a CRAM report – so different is it in style – because it is done in the US way. Certainly in the ’80s I remember that Americans wanted to ‘quantify’ everything in a group discussion, they were always sending notes in to the moderator. Many a time you had to hold them back – generally by their red braces – from bursting in and interrupting the group. Guinness in America [beer]: Analysis of Data from American Group Discussions and Extension Groups – The CRAM Peter Cooper Collection – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Guinness Ireland: A fascinating exposition of old vs new Guinness, old vs new Ireland, the image of drinkers – you can learn more about Ireland in 1984 from this report than from any history textbook. Guinness Ireland [beer] – The CRAM Peter Cooper Collection – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
French Agricultural Produce in Great Britain: The findings as a whole provide for the time (1984): first, a rich picture of British life, covering cooking and eating habits, shopping and key products like cheese, wine etc. Secondly, an insight into social class which was still one of the major variables affecting behaviour in the UK. And thirdly, indications on social changes taking place away from traditional British habits towards more relaxed attitudes towards foreign foods. Here’s a quote from the summary: ‘British attitudes to France, the French and French products are a complex mixture of resentment and admiration’. Plus ça change! French Agricultural Produce in Great Britain: a typological study of consumers [of French foods and wines] – The CRAM Peter Cooper Collection – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Motoring History
And last, but definitely not least, a new curated collection developed by Peter Mouncey.
This new collection is a set of reports and papers on the behaviour, attitudes and expenditure on motoring by British motorists (excluding Northern Ireland) primarily based on research undertaken for, or by, the Automobile Association (AA), covering the 1970s/80s. Whilst much of this archive is based on data collected through the monthly Omnicar Survey of Motorists (run by Sample Surveys Ltd), there are also a number of other ad hoc studies, which cover the broader role of the car as a transport mode within society. This unique collection illustrates the period during which car ownership became the norm for most British families, causing massive changes in our way of life. Motoring history – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Newsletter No. 3, 2023
Letter from the Editor
Do you remember the dinner party syndrome, when you told people you were in ‘market research’ and very few outside the industry really understood what it was about? When you used expressions like ‘consumer dissonance’, ‘trade-off’ and ‘top-of-mind’, in your every-day conversations, without realising you were using a well-understood industry shorthand?
A similar situation is arising with AMSR. We, who are so immersed in its vision and history, and understand its eclectic nature, have to explain the way in which it can support and inspire people in market research and academia.
To this end we are embarking on an Awareness Campaign, targeted primarily at the research and insight industry, to help in providing a context and perspective to their research.
Confession alert: although I am on LinkedIn, I am not by age or inclination involved in social media. But I know and appreciate that it is invaluable in telling the world what we are about. So this is a plea, to those who are involved in social media, to share, comment, re-tweet and generally tell everybody about the richness of the data in the Archive.
We have agreed a strapline to the campaign – ‘Making History’ – which we feel encompasses the message we are disseminating. Paul Edwards has written some lovely thoughts about what this means in terms of our vision. “An archive exists to preserve assets, not to keep them secret. The Archive of Market and Social Research is a gold mine of content and examples of how great market and social research have changed the world. It is online and free to use. More than just asking questions we are Making History”.
As part of the Campaign, I am running a regular column – The AMSR Newsletter Interview, talking to Research Leaders about the role of the Archive. I am delighted that Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos, is spearheading the series, and our interview is below.
We are delighted that Claire Langhamer and Colin McDonald have joined the AMSR Board of Trustees. We hope to run interviews with them in our next issue.
We also have Phyllis Macfarlane’s informative report about how we are progressing with our efforts to increase usage of the Archive in schools.
Organisations like the Better Statistics Campaign and NatCen are of particular interest to the market and social research industry, so we are pleased to include reports of their Events. The recent BSC Conference ‘What is the future for the UKSA?’ aimed to contribute to the review of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority currently in progress under the leadership of AMSR President Professor Denise Lievesley, who was appointed by the Cabinet Office for this task. NatCen’s launch of the 40th edition of British Social Attitudes showed the analogous nature of longitudinal survey series with the Archive. Like the BSA we take the long view.
AMSR Trustee Board
Professor Claire Langhamer and Colin McDonald have joined the AMSR Board of Trustees.
Claire Langhamer is an enthusiastic user of the Archive and has spoken at AMSR Events and the recent joint Mass Observation Webinar about its importance as a source of information for cultural and historical research.
She is Director of the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of Modern History at the University of London, and a Trustee of the Mass Observation Archive. A social and cultural historian of modern Britain, she has particular research interests in feeling, experience and everyday life.
Colin McDonald has been a member of the Contents Committee and a very active AMSR volunteer since its inception. He has been closely involved from the beginning, with others, in designing the ways in which AMSR material is organised, classified and described in our catalogue and on the OCLC website (its ‘metadata’). With subject matter varying enormously both in form and content, this is an essential task for making the experience of archive users as simple and rewarding as possible.
He spent 40 years working in the research industry, starting initially with Reckitt & Sons. He later worked at BMRB and then as Chairman of Communication Research. He is a Fellow of The Market Research Society.
AMSR Chairman Professor Patrick Barwise says, “We are excited to welcome two such distinguished and experienced Trustees, and I look forward to working with them to steer the charity as we broaden our user base and continue to collect materials that preserve the heritage of our industry”.
Claire Langhamer says, “The Archive is an absolute treasure trove for researchers interested in the practices of everyday life and I am particularly keen to promote its use among historians of modern Britain”.
Colin McDonald says, “Like others, I deeply believe in the importance of preserving this unique material from being lost and of making it freely available to all: academics, practitioners, new researchers, everyone”.
We shall be publishing interviews with Claire and Colin in the next issue of the Newsletter.
The AMSR Interview
Ben Page, Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos, talks to Phyllis Vangelder
Ben Page is Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos, a remit covering 90 countries. So I was delighted that he could find time in his busy schedule to talk to me about the role of the Archive.
Ipsos, like many other research companies, has been extremely helpful to AMSR. In expressing our appreciation of this support, I asked Ben what attracts him to the Archive. “I’m an historian by training and I believe in the adage ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them’. But in any case I think the Archive is of fundamental value to the research industry. It provides an understanding of people’s behaviour and how they felt at a particular point in time. It enables you to take the long view about attitudes and opinions – how they have changed and how in fact they have often remained the same. Values don’t change so much”.
For example on nostalgia, around half of the population believe that their parent’s childhood was so much better than their own. But the Archive can retrieve people’s voices at the time and allows you to understand their experiences in context and within the culture of their time. Was it really ‘better’? Longitudinal studies and the Archive can tell us so much. How did people react to the first motorways? How are they reacting now to the change to electric cars?
While there are agencies which have the same values as Ipsos, there are many modern ones which do not. They are interested mainly in the present and the future and do not see the point of looking back. Ben ascribed this primarily to the fact that many of these companies are not run by researchers. Their owners do not start with a research mindset. However now everything is digital agencies should find it easy to pass their data to the Archive. Of course there is always the problem of commercial confidentiality and intellectual property. Clients do worry about brand and client confidentiality, though in many cases this can be negotiated so that only older data (20+ years) is available, and a constraint can be put on accessibility. Much of the value of so many reports is not in their brand positioning itself so much as in the generic product profile, and the context of how consumers understood a product or service at a point in time.
AMSR has embarked on an Awareness Campaign, directed particularly at the market and social research industry. Ben Page’s advice is to tell agencies that they should not let their work go to waste. Let the Archive reinforce its value by curating and preserving it. The Archive will enable them to ‘Make History’ (as the AMSR’s awareness campaign puts it).
AMSR’s primary target audience has been identified as Modern and Contemporary History Academics. Ben agreed that they were particularly interested in the past and how this impacted on the present and the future. And the fact that the Archive is free to access and digital is a tremendous attraction. He believes that while we have done excellent work with schools, our approach is too scattergun. However, Examination Boards are another potential target. If the Archive can become part of the curriculum, to be used in course work, this would inevitably increase usage.
We talked about our hope of getting grants to ensure the sustainability of the Archive. Ben stressed the need to find senior academic people, probably in Modern or Contemporary History to work in cooperation with the Archive. We have to have good professional applications (many charities in fact appoint professional people in this capacity). Working with universities is also a route to accreditation. Grants are probably more accessible for social research by government and charities.
Ben Page believes that Artificial Intelligence will have a tremendous impact on our industry. We have to engage with a new source of data. “I have 20,000 focus groups that have been recorded. If we load every focus group, we can build models to embrace all sorts of areas. We know language has changed in so many areas; who would now talk about ‘housewives at home’? The language in the way people talk to children has also changed. AI can bring this information together. It can also summarise category level information. It is this aspect, rather than brand information, which will allow it to be accessed across the industry. This is a generative model that could be available to the Archive. It will improve search information and help people to get data. I believe our survival depends on AI”.
School Report
Phyllis Macfarlane reports progress on our schools programme
A-Level Schools Project
We now have 28 schools signed up to use the Archive for their A-Level Modern British History coursework and dissertations and hope to gain a few more from an emailing this term. We have sent these schools our new Guide to the Archive, and more recently a copy of our latest Book – which contains a lot of useful material for A-Level Students. But teachers are very busy people! We have to keep communicating to them. So we shall send them a video about the Archive, which they can use for teaching, together with a video demonstration of how to search the Archive – using a couple of typical examples. (It is like the ones you see on YouTube – which show you everything from how to do tables in Powerpoint to how to change a plug).
We keep emphasising how valuable a skill it is to be able to search Archives and that, as we are digital, free and easy to use , we’re a good place to start!
The first video was very kindly made for us by Amanda Hammond of Opinium, representing &More – the MRS youth group. Since &More have a mission to promote careers in MR in Schools we managed to ‘kill two birds with one stone’, as it were. Amanda starts by telling the A-Level students how she got into MR and what she does. She is a natural when it comes to videos and, of course, she’s rather closer in age to the audience, which is also good. Ipsos Mori kindly made the videos for us, for which we are very grateful.
Book 3 – Researching The Public: Post-War Policy, Politics and Polling
The Editors, Judith Staig and Phyllis Vangelder, write
We hope you have now looked at the latest book in the AMSR series on ‘Showcasing the Archive’.
Paul Edwards has written a wonderful review of the book, which is on our website.
Here is an extract to give you its flavour.
“What struck me when reading through these essays is that research actually matters. Peter Bartram describes how research was used to understand winter mortality statistics which led directly to the winter fuel allowance. Colin Strong shows how the difficulties of self-reporting were overcome to understand seat belt usage which led to new legislation and advertising which dramatically reduced deaths in road traffic accidents. Bob Erens and Kaye Wellings relate how reliable data on changing sexual behaviours and changing public opinion eased the way for changes in legislation. Graham Mytton tells us how the BBC World Service used audience data to build an increased budget for audience research which in turn justified greater investment from the foreign office.
I could go on. We are confronted by example after example of research being instrumental in government policy. And because it really matters it is important that research is of high quality and sound execution – representative samples, well thought out and unbiased questions, sensitive and thorough analysis followed by clear and honest communication. The basics of our trade are still important and no matter how much data collection techniques change we should not be allowed to forget them. Bad research will lead to bad legislation. Democracy depends on being able to listen to the public and rely on what we hear.
‘Researching the public’ is only 70 pages long. No essay goes on for too long. In fact you are usually left wanting even more – which is no problem because each essay comes with a set of references into the Archive. These books are all about showcasing the content of the Archive and making people want to dive in and find out more.
For the individual this book is a fascinating read; several times I found myself thinking ‘I never knew that’. On a wider level the AMSR is emerging as a vital resource for the study of history, sociology and politics. This is important for education but has a much wider value too; even if we don’t believe that history can tell us the future these essays demonstrate that we would be very foolish to ignore it. As Bobby Duffy says in his preface: “it’s clear that the insights from these studies shaped their times, and can still inform us today”.
The role of the AMSR in all of this is to protect the past (and the present) for the future. These papers demonstrate how we can access the Archive and use it to illustrate the UK’s recent past.
……..these essays show just what can be done with research”.
Do look at the full review, linked here.
We sent the Book to a friendly ‘lay’ reader, a retired solicitor, who is not very knowledgeable about research, but finds it increasingly fascinating:
He had this to say: “ I have read the book from cover to cover and it deals with so many fundamental issues . Some are crucial ones that we lay people don’t even think about – research evidence guiding Government policy in dealing with the Covid problem, the whole question of Referenda, looking at the influence of opinion polls. Then historical insights into seal belts and the BBC World Service. So many worthwhile contributions brought together by the Editors”.
Of course, we are very pleased with the responses to the Book and we are in the process of posting regular links from it on LinkedIn.
You may have seen the post in the AMSR LinkedIn feed about ‘Ducks and Danger’. This is just one example of how we are bringing wider awareness of the richness of the Archive to different audiences in order to enlarge its usage.
Book 3 is available, like Book 1 and 2, to download free from the website. Or you can obtain it either as a separate volume, or as a bundle of three, in return for a donation to the Archive. Details are on our website.
Better Statistics
Good statistics are a bedrock of good research, particularly for accurate, pinpointed sampling, trend data and insights into behaviour and attitudes.
Tony Dent, with his fellow Directors of Better Statistics CIC, Phyllis Macfarlane and Iain MacKay, have worked indefatigably for the cause of Better Statistics in the UK. The Conference on 19 September 2023, ‘What is the future for UKSA?’ is the fifth Conference that Tony has set up to focus on improving statistics and their dissemination.
The recent one-day Conference aimed to contribute to the review of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA) currently in progress under the leadership of Professor Denise Lievesley, CBE, who was appointed by the Cabinet Office for this task. (She has had very many distinguished appointments including Principal of Green Templeton College Oxford and Director of the ESRC Data Archive – now known as the UK Data Archive, and is of course President of the Archive of Market and Social Research).
UKSA is a non-ministerial department established by the Statistics and Registration Services Act of 2007 and the terms of reference for the Review are to establish how the organisation is performing in delivering necessary services as efficiently as possible. The Review is also considering whether the Authority has clear governance and lines of accountability.
The speakers at the Conference, eminent writers and leaders in the industry, spoke within the context of the four areas representing the focus for the review: efficacy, governance, accountability, and efficiency.
The first session looked at measurements for a changing world, concentrating on the measurement of inflation and the problems of CPIH and Household Cost Indices (HCIs). The former, it was suggested, is a tool of policy, in accordance with the EU Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices, the latter reflects the behaviour of ordinary people. Morgan Wild, Head of Policy at Citizens Advice, which works to understand the underlying causes of deprivation, believes there is a lack of understanding about public confidence in the Inflation measures. Throughout the Conference there was strong emphasis, both on the lay consumer (who had received daily public statistical data during the Covid epidemic) and the non-statistical end user of official statistics. Jill Leyland who represents the RSS on the National Statistician’s ‘Advisory panel on Consumer Prices – Stakeholder’ stressed the importance of public credibility and the need to separate macro-economics from the direct experience of people.
Dr Emma Gordon. Director of Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) at the ESRC, described its work at opening up secure access to government administrative data to support research and inform policy decisions. She stressed the need to work collaboratively, linking administrative data with data from the myriad of other sources including survey data.
The importance of the subject to market research, was evidenced in the session on ‘The importance of Inclusion’ which was chaired by Dr Emma White, Director of Information Governance and the DPO at City University and Chairman of the MRS Census & Demographics Group. The importance of social inclusion and of equality, diversity and inclusion in market research, as well as open data with a public interface, were all stressed in this session. Rebecca Cole, Managing Director of Cobalt Sky, asked ‘how representative are samples and research design practices?’ Definitions of ethnicity and gender identification both in public and private surveys were discussed and there appeared to be a strong sense that the current definition of ethnicity should be extended. This subject was again addressed in the session on ‘Positive influencers’ when Michael Biggs, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford, looked at the issue of Gender Identity in the Census. In the afternoon, Alice Sullivan, Professor of Sociology and Head of Research at the UCL Social Research Institute, pointed out that social statisticians argued against the self-identification guidance on sexual questions. Binary classification was certainly changing.
Looking for improvement
The afternoon focused on ‘Looking for improvement’.
Under the heading of ‘Regulation and the Code of Practice’, the tenets of good practice were scrutinised in some detail. The principles are universal: trustworthiness, quality and value. Steve Penneck, Past-President of the International Statistical Institute, sees value in terms of its contribution to the public good and he made a case for the development of Statistical Leaders.
Phyllis Macfarlane, a Director of Better Statistics CIC and Head of AMSR Collections, who chaired this session, commented that we need public awareness and understanding of public statistics. The public needs to know who is responsible for determining what statistics should be collected, and how statistics contribute to policy. Ultimately the public helps to create statistics through participating in surveys and completing administrative forms; they need education in the real value of their contribution.
Governance
Adam Phillips, AMSR Chief Executive, contributed to the session on Governance, using his previous experience in the Financial Services Sector, to recommend a model using a Consumer Panel of Experts to advise Regulators. These are well-connected experts in their own field, who can often bring in views of different stakeholders. They would have clear terms of reference and statuary status and could review the performance of Regulators.
Dr Walter Radermacher, Federation of European National Statistical Societies, talked of the Sociology of Quantification. He suggested that the statistical logic of the past is being replaced by data logic.
He stressed the need to have new users and future users on board.
The components of measurement means balancing user needs versus methodology. The public want time series, but many of the new types of data sources do not in fact produce them.
Sir Robert Chote, Chairman of UKSA, pointed out that the majority of statistics do not in fact come from the ONS. The statistical system must be for society as a whole, not just for politicians and policy-makers. There was an emphasis throughout the Conference on the need to understand the needs of different users.
Tony talks passionately about making statistics ‘strictly human’ – making them matter to people. The object of this Conference was how we charge the UKSA with that objective.
This is no more than an overview. It is impossible to give the full flavour of the informed presentations and discussions, as well as the sense of involvement and commitment of the audience at this Conference. Do go to the Better Statistics website for slides and videos of the event.
British Social Attitudes
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), formerly Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) headed by the late guru Sir Roger Jowell, has been tracking social and political attitudes in Britain since 1983. British Social Attitudes has been conducted every year since then. Its longevity, breadth of content and high quality research design make BSA a ’gold standard’ of longitudinal survey series.
Its affinity with the Archive of Market and Social Research is manifest. Book 3 in the AMSR series of ‘Showcasing the Archive’, on ‘Researching the Public’ focuses on many of the issues covered by BSA i.e. attitudes towards sexual and moral issues, inflation and unequal Britain and political attitudes. Book 2 ‘How we’ve changed: social trends from post-war to present day and beyond’ similarly explored gender roles and work and generational differences.
A launch reception to mark the fortieth issue of BSA was held at Portcullis House on 21 September 2023. Sir John Curtice, Senior Research Fellow at NatCen, gave the opening paper, presenting public attitudes and expectations towards the role and responsibilities of government. In the AMSR Book 3, he authored the chapter on ’Referendums: how do voters decide?’. Sir John’s work highlights the importance of looking at long-term changes in the climate of public opinion. He traced changing trends over the past four decades to establish whether they were secular or cyclical i.e have they moved in the same direction or ended up where they started. He found that younger people tend to be more liberal than older people. There were certainly age differences in attitudes towards tax and spending and changing expectations of Government’s responsibilities. He also identified ‘thermostatic’ reactions i.e. people respond to what’s happening and what they see or hear in the media. Sir John also pointed out that liberalisation is often driven by generational replacement and we might expect a further liberalisation of attitudes because of this phenomenon.
Elizabeth Clery, an Independent Social Research Consultant, looked at attitudes towards sexual and moral issues over the last 40 years. As pointed out by Sir John and shown in the Chapter in Book 3 by Erens and Wellings, ‘Sexual behaviour: how permissive attitudes led to liberal policies’, the British public has become increasing more liberal in its outlook on sexual relationships, non-traditional families and abortion. However, though many of our attitudes have moved in a liberal direction the trend is not universal. Our attitudes towards transgender issues are less tolerant.
Oliver Heath, Professor of Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London, discussed his chapter in the BSA on ‘Unequal Britain: the reawakening of class divisions’. Has class identity really waned? Do the public believe that Britian has become a class-less society? The survey showed little evidence of a decline in class identity. It appears to be shaped by lived experience: education, type of job and region are strong influences.
A distinguished group of panellists, representing the Fawcett Society, Onward, The Resolution Foundation and the House of Commons Library, reflected on the survey. Their informed opinions and the involvement of the audience made for a fascinating overview of the many societal issues highlighted in BSA.
For full information about British Social Attitudes visit www.natcen.ac.uk
Recent Additions To The Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane writes
New donations keep coming in: prompted by the Summer Party, or the MRS Conference, or articles in Newsletters – or just mentioning the Archive to colleagues in conversation. People are pleased to donate the work that they are proud of – or simply to have a place to send their own ‘collections’ of interesting projects.
Recently uploaded to the Archive we have: ‘Does your holiday make you sick?’ a report on holiday-related stresses and sicknesses conducted for BUPA in 1991 – donated by Peter Bartram. It’s really very insightful – I think we can all relate to it. (1)
Also ‘Representation and portrayal of audiences on BBC television’ a Kantar Media report from 2018 – donated by Kathryn Hall. This will be very useful to students of diversity in the future. Note that it is not particularly complimentary. Much progress has been made in the last few years – presumably prompted by this report! (2)
Also ‘Consultation on inclusive data’ (2021) and ‘Public dialogue on genome editing in farmed animals’(2022) – donated by Basis Social. The Consultation on Inclusive data was conducted for the ONS (3), the Consultation on Genome Editing for The Nuffield Council on Bioethics and The Biological Sciences Research Council (4).
All three of these reports contribute significantly to our concept of building a ‘modern’ collection of value to the students of the future.
We also continue to scan and upload the Alan Hedges donation – which is a real treasure trove of hundreds of reports.
Recent additions include some very relevant and interesting reports on Air Pollution and Climate change. For example ‘Air pollution health messages: perceptions among vulnerable groups: report on qualitative research’ from 1999 (5) and ’Attitudes to energy conservation in the home: a qualitative study from 1991 (6) (NB: book). These will be of interest to those researching the issues of how climate change was thought of and addressed in the 1990s. Which is bound to be a huge area of study in the future.
It’s the sheer range of research in the Alan Hedges Collection that is also interesting. These reports caught my eye: ‘Unbanked cash-paid wage-earners: report on research among unbanked, weekly-paid wage-earners’ conducted in 1980 for NatWest (7) and ‘Report on a qualitative study of temporary accommodation for the homeless’ (8) conducted in 1987 for The Centre for Urban and Regional Studies and the Department of the Environment, also ‘Rear seat belts: report on a qualitative study of two advertising treatments’ (9) done in 1992 for the COI.
The Collection also covers commercial work – including many great projects for Guinness – and, rather excitingly for me – as we’ve done a lot of work on Lucozade’s transformation from a health drink to an energy drink in the early 1980s – a project on a potential competitor: ‘Topaz [energy drink]: report on exploratory qualitative research’ (1980) for Sterling Health (10). Topaz seems to have been a rather ill-thought through product – too much like Lucozade – but the project is an interesting insight into product development thinking at the time. The CRAM (Peter Cooper) Lucozade reports only take us so far into how the Lucozade transformation was conceived and executed – the advertising agencies like to claim all the credit – but then they would, wouldn’t they? This project for Sterling Health represents an interesting insight into competitor innovation, another piece of the jigsaw, but what we are really missing is the strategic thinking from the client (Beecham) research and marketing side. If anyone knows it – I would be very grateful to understand.
I’m thinking that there must be mileage into how the concept of physical ‘energy’ and aging has evolved in the post-war consumer world. Anyone remember the ‘Phyllosan fortifies the over-forties’ ads of the 50s and 60s? There’s a CRAM report on the Phyllosan advertising from 1974 (11), where the slogan had progressed to ‘Phyllosan really does fortify the over-forties’! And wasn’t Aspirin advertised at one time as being just the thing for when you feel ‘one degree under’? We don’t think of people in their 40s as ‘aging’ now – but it seems there’s always been an issue around ‘feeling tired’ and needing a ‘pick-me-up’, and products have been developed to meet the need.
This is the sort of background research in the Archive that could lead to true innovation – based on real understanding of long-term and underlying consumer needs and trends. It’s the sixty- and seventy-year-olds who need these products now! But that doesn’t mean that insights from earlier generations are not relevant – they are a real part of the human puzzle.
Overall, it’s fascinating to see how the research industry is always at the heart of contemporary thinking at every point in time. We have such a legacy in the Archive of ‘frozen history’ which is invaluable to understand how opinion and attitudes have evolved and developed, and the products to meet those basic needs have been brought to market.
As Ben Page points out in his interview, you can learn a great deal about context from the research in the Archive. Judith Staig’s recent article ‘Sweet Treats’ in Research Live uses the Archive to demonstrate that the relationship between children, sweets and mothers has not changed in 50 years.
References:
- Does your holiday make you sick? A survey of the impact of holiday-related stresses and illnesses on the British people. – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Representation and portrayal of audiences on BBC television – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Consultation on inclusive data – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Public dialogue on genome editing in farmed animals – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Air pollution health messages: perceptions among vulnerable groups: report on qualitative research – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Attitudes to energy conservation in the home: a qualitative study – Books – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Unbanked cash-paid wage-earners: report on research among unbanked, weekly-paid wage-earners – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Report on a qualitative study of temporary accommodation for the homeless – main stage – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Rear seat belts: report on a qualitative study of two advertising treatments – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Topaz [energy drink]: report on exploratory qualitative research – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Qualitative Research on Phyllosan press advertising – The CRAM Peter Cooper Collection – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Newsletter No. 2, 2023
Letter from the Editor
This issue focuses on AMSR’s activities during the past few months. It has been a particularly busy time for our volunteer teams, culminating in the superb Summer Party in June. Early in May we held a joint Webinar with Mass Observation, showcasing the synergies between the Archives, with presentations from academics who have used them both. And then the next day we had a stand at the Oxford Bodleian History Thesis Fair. In March we also had a stand at the MRS Conference and on 15 June we had a stand at the MRS Storytelling Conference.
None of these activities are inward-looking. We are reaching out to all our stakeholders – supporters, volunteers and users from academia, research agencies and schools. As Judith Staig’s sensitive report of The Market Research Society Conference and Judith Wardle’s delightful account of the Oxford Fair show, we value the opportunity to showcase our work through Conferences and Academic Fairs, encouraging researchers of every kind to use the Archive. Detailed reports of these activities are below.
Historian David Olusoga was a key speaker at the MRS Conference. The text of his replies to an interview, which Judith Staig includes in her report, is very apposite to AMSR. He was asked ‘How have you used digital artefacts in your work and what is the value of these, compared with the original documents?’ David’s description of his engagement with digital documents, and the way he uses and values them, is required reading.
The Summer Party saw the launch of Book 3 in our Series ‘Showcasing the Archive’- Researching the Public: post-war politics, politic and polling. This book focuses on the role of research in the public arena and highlights the vast amount of material in the Archive which illustrates the impact of the research and insights sector on issues of societal concern.
We have come a long way since we started in 2016!
After the Party I was delighted to talk to Jim Whaley and Joe Jordan from our Sponsor OvationMR. We are so proud that a company like Ovation wishes to support our work in preserving the thinking of the past to inspire insight for the present and the future. The full interview is below.
AMSR Summer Party
This is a quite formal record of the highly successful AMSR Summer Party held on 13 June in a delightful setting on the 8th floor of Bush House. There are several more informal impressions of the Event. Do look at Ray Poynter’s blog on his NewMR website where he states “My mind was blown away by what I saw at an AMSR Event”. There is also a video of the proceedings on the AMSR Vimeo website, and Paul Edwards has written a review of the event.
In his opening introduction, Professor Patrick Barwise thanked OvationMR for kindly sponsoring the Event and the Policy Institute at King’s for hosting the wonderful venue.
Following the outline of the evening’s programme, he drew attention to AMSR’s third edited book, Researching the public: post-war policy, politics and polling which is about a range of public policy insights from the Archive. (link). You can find the book review by Paul Edwards on our website.
He stressed the importance of academic historians – especially those interested in modern British social and cultural history – as potential users.
He was delighted that Professor Jane Hamlett from Royal Holloway College would be describing her research on pets in the home and how and why she’s used AMSR as one of her sources.
There was also a video recording of a presentation by Sir John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University and leading expert on political polling, who unfortunately was not able to be present at the Event. John’s presentation illustrated the Archive’s potential as an academic resource beyond history.
As well as politics, other potential areas we’ve identified include sociology, economics, human geography, and – of course -marketing and market research, for teaching as well as research.
Patrick Barwise pointed out, with the best will in the world, nothing happens quickly in academia. So, a second front opened last year, with a small-scale pilot project with A-level history students at Notting Hill and Ealing High School. This went really well and AMSR is now building on it,, aiming to reach more schools this year and – it is hoped – many more over the next 2-3 years.
Patrick Barwise invited Jim Whaley, CEO of OvationMR, who sponsored this event, to say a few words. Jim came to our event here last year and has become an enthusiastic supporter of our work. Jim stressed that Ovation shared the vision of AMSR. He was joined by Michel Jones and Joe Jordan who underlined his support for AMSR. Phyllis Vangelder spoke to Jim and Joe in more detail following the Event and he enlarged on this vision. (The interview follows this report).
Joe Jordan presented the ‘fun’ part of Ovation’s contribution, drawing a raffle with prizes of Michelin-rated meals. He was delighted that Sheila Robinson, a volunteer scanner and Professor Jane Hamlett, a guest speaker, were winners of the raffle.
AMSR and Pet Histories
Professor Barwise introduced Professor Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway College, University of London. Jane is the author, with Julie-Marie Strange, of the recently published book, Pet Revolution – Animals and the Making of Modern British Life., based on a large-scale archival survey for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which explored the changing role of pets in family life 1837-1939 (See AMSR Newsletters for full details of the Book and Project: Issue 4, 2022 ‘Cats in the Archive’; Issue 1, 2023 ‘The Pet Revolution’).
Jane has explored how pet-keeping practice has changed over a century. During the 19th Century more people began to keep pets. This became acceptable and was particularly important in Victorian family life. In fact, Jane suggested, keeping wild animals and birds was in keeping with the Victorian mentality, whereas later people became more aware of keeping animals in their natural habitat. Jane illustrated the appearance of animals in family photos and commented on the fact that keeping animals was an economic phenomenon – pet shops, veterinary businesses and pet food became aspects of the British economy.
Survey sources for the project included three strands: cultural representation of pets in visual and print culture, the consumption of pets, pet health and pet-related goods and pets in everyday life through personal documentation. Jane illustrated some personal views about pet ownership. (See the AMSR Newsletter article ‘Cats in the Archive, cited above, for an account of a monograph on Siamese cats.)
Jane has used the Archive in her research. A report from Products and people: a digest of the marketing survey of the European Common market and Britain 1963, reported that 54% of households in Great Britain had at least one pet in 1963, 25% had at least one dog and 20% had at least one cat.
A more graphic picture was from AMSR’s CRAM Collection of Qualitative Research from groups on Soft Moist Cat Food and Packaging, conducted in 1973, in which a segmentation analysis unpacked three groups in relation to their cat ownership. The personal involvement with the cat was the major criterion of difference between these groups, enabling three separate types of cat owner groups to be identified: cosseters, acceptors and resenters.
Jane felt that the Archive had been really helpful in her research. She pointed out that pet keeping was only the tip of the iceberg in the Archive. There is a huge range of topics to be explored by researchers in social and cultural history.
Taking the longer view
Sir John Curtice, Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, apologised that he was unable to be present at the Event, but he recorded his paper on the value of polling archives – using data from them to understand the present.
He contended that looking at archives and taking a historical view is important in understanding the present as well as giving us an idea of what the past was like.
Those of us who work in polls and surveys are very much caught up in world of the present: we want to understand the latest trends and developments. If we want to understand where we are now, we also have to know where we have come from, and how we have changed, not just in the short run, but in the long run.
His presentation focused on long-term trends in public attitudes to the Royal Family (‘Is the Monarchy still popular?’) and also his chapter on two referendums on Brexit in our Book 3 in our Series ‘Showcasing the Archive’ (‘Why did Britain vote against leaving the EU in 1975, but in favour in 2016?’).
Looking first at the Monarchy, several questions have been posed over the years examining the popularity of the Monarchy: A Republic versus a Monarchy; Would we be better off or worse off if the Monarchy was abolished? Is the Monarchy important? Is having a Monarchy good or bad for Britain? These questions were asked over a long period and John traced the differences in the periods, noting the effect of different events on people’s views. Support for the Monarchy was high after the film depicting the ‘model family’ in 1969 when 88% thought the Monarchy was good for Britain. It declined in the ‘annus horribilis’’ in 1992 when the Queen herself talked about the failed marriages in her family and the fire at Windsor. A certain decline in support has also occurred more recently in the face of broken marriages, family rifts and bad press about Prince Andrew and the Sussexes.
Going on to look at changes in attitudes about the Referendums, John examined the history of polling during referendum campaigns, to explore the differences in the results in the two Referendums, 1975 and 2016. Before 1975 there was a largely stable outlook between Remain and Leave, though a bit up towards leaving. In 1975, people were asked about their attitudes if the agreement was re-negotiated, but it didn’t make much difference. Polls had it very close.
Then, in 2016, David Cameron emerged with a re-negotiated agreement with the EU and recommended that Britain Remain. But in fact a majority voted to Leave, foreshadowing the earlier polls which said renegotiation would not make a difference.
You can only understand the importance of issues by taking a long view. In the run-up to the 2016 Referendum the polls highlighted that the central issue was the importance of net immigration figures whereas, in 1975, immigration was not an issue: the issues then were economic. People were worried that prices were going up.
John stressed that you can only get a true perspective on our current position by taking a long view. This is crucial for all of us who want to research the public. He concluded by pointing the audience to AMSR’s newly published book (add link): Researching the Public: post-war policy, politics and polling in which he has contributed a Chapter on ‘Referendums: how do voters decide?’
Developing usage
Patrick Barwise introduced Phyllis Macfarlane, who chairs the Contents Team and is very involved in marketing to schools. She described recent AMSR activities in the sphere of developing usage. “There is no point in having an excellent Archive if it isn’t used! So, we’ve been focusing on growing the number of users, targeting universities, schools and market research/insight professionals”.
However, she explained that the largest potential was schools and gave the reasons for this. Education is AMSR’s legal object as a charity. AMSR had some considerable success with a two-year pilot with Notting Hill and Ealing High School A level history students. There were four users in the first year and eight this year. Schools introduce new users to the same topics every year and some will go on to use the Archive at University. Several subjects are possible. So, 30 schools at 10/15 students per year equals 300-450 users a year.
The Archive has several advantages for schools: it is free; digital and totally accessible; easy to use; it has an interesting and unique coverage; it is not too deep and importantly, it gives students experience of using archives.
Phyllis showed the Guide to the AMSR Archive for Modern British History A-level students, which has been sent out. This gives a simple step-by-step explanation on how to access the Archive. Phyllis pointed out that if students start to use the Archive and find interesting content quickly, they soon learn how to search for themselves. They can also get sample exercises on different A-level subjects. e.g. ‘Assess the reasons for Margaret Thatcher’s downfall in the 1990s.’ Phyllis commented “If they can get results easily and quickly, they are hooked!”
To date a total of 18 schools have been recruited. AMSR expects to recruit a further 15 schools this year from follow-up mailings. But we must now create strong relationships with those we have. “We need a ‘Schools Ambassador’. We need to support teachers and pupils and extend to other subjects. We need publicity and support and we need to connect with those who set the curriculum. Contacts and volunteers would be very helpful”.
Developing universities
Phyllis described a Presentation she has recently given to Kings College Master Students of Contemporary History and Politics. She found that their interests covered politics and political altitudes; immigration; political parties; the Internet and politics, the EU and UK’s relations with China. She estimated that out of 35 students about 80% will find useful data in the Archive. We need to recruit about three universities a year.
Phyllis identified interesting differences between schools and universities:
- A-levels are broader, less deep and earlier (‘60s and ‘70s)
- Masters are deeper and narrower, and more modern (late ‘80s-2000s) – more Tony Blair than Mrs Thatcher.
She noted that we have a ‘Dark Age’ in the Archive. 1995-2010 reports were digital, but not well-archived. They are consequently difficult to locate. We need to campaign to find these reports before they are lost forever.
She concluded by looking at researchers and insight professionals as target users. Many reports can be enhanced by introducing context. Asking the same questions historically can demonstrate change. AMSR is also developing training materials for younger researchers to help develop skills. Its key objective is to help people to use the Archive.
What we have done and where we are going
AMSR CEO Adam Phillips rounded up the formal presentations by describing what we have achieved in the last year and our plans for the future.
He pointed out that what the audience had heard was only a small sample of what the Archive offers, but word was spreading.
Adam presented a slide showing how our usership is growing. It illustrated the growth in the number of unique users over the last three years. He used three-month rolling averages presented monthly, to smooth out the random variation in the data, because this is the longest period that Google data can reliably deliver. The number of users has tripled over the last three years and we now have more than 600 users a quarter and over 200 a month. We are aiming to more than double this number over the next two years.
The portal website www.amsr.org.uk is the initial gateway to the Archive for most new users. It is attracting over 450 visits a month and a fairly steady 1,400 visits every three months.
Adam commented that we had tried at this Event to show what the Archive of Market and Social Research is for and what its future holds. To get there we continue to need support.
He appealed for more volunteers at all levels; the 45 volunteers we have are very stretched.
“We need more content for the Archive before it is deleted or lost. If you think you have something we might like, please let us know “.
“Finally, we need money. We are an extremely efficient organisation. Our annual budget is around £35,000 p.a. and we are almost entirely staffed by volunteers. If we are to continue to grow, we need to increase our income by 50% over the next two years”.
Adam appealed for donations. He also spoke of the value of legacies. These provide funds that allow us to invest in areas where it is difficult to attract grants or get sponsorship. They can also contribute to an endowment to sustain AMSR in the long term. Judie Lannon’s generous legacy enabled us to carry out some important basic research on how research data and reports are preserved. It also allowed us to invest in the early stage of the schools project.
Adam went on to speak of the need, this year, to upgrade our website because of changes in the underlying software. And we also need to improve our user analytics system. Both of these will be expensive. We can apply for grants, but this is very slow. Donations and sponsorship enable us to move in months rather than years.
Q & A Session
At the close of the formal presentations, Patrick Barwise chaired a Q & A discussion session, Jane Hamlett, Phyllis Macfarlane and Adam Phillips comprising the panel.
Kelly Beaver, IPSOS CEO, commented that sometimes the joy of searching archives get lost. Jane Hamlett’s paper was a delightful reminder of the pleasure of search.
She recognised the added value that AMSR’s Volunteer Team can provide by finding relevant contexts for research organisations. She saw members of such a Team as ‘Ambassadors’ in the organisations they helped. She asked if AMSR Volunteers could provide that level of support for research projects.
Phyllis Macfarlane was certain that members of her team would be able to provide contextual support for eg marketing studies and specific product surveys. Adam Phillips suggested such a service would be particularly appropriate for middle-range researchers – people who had been in research organisations for four or five years.
Graham Mytton paid tribute to the work of Colin McDonald and the many other volunteers who had been collecting and organising the tremendous collection now in the Archive at the touch of a key. He acknowledged the ‘black hole’ identified by Phylllis Macfarlane, and made a plea to everybody in the room to search for data on their laptops and disks to provide early digital data.
Colin McDonald regretted that because of publishers’ commercial interests the Archive could not put up material online after 2000. This affected MRS conference material and full contents of the JMRS and IJMRS. (We can still put up selected papers).
Adam Philips recognised the difficulties of persuading academic publishers of information sources to release their content. We are free but for them their content can be a source of revenue.
In a discussion of curriculum in schools, Phyllis Macfarlane saw one of the AMSR’s roles as a champion for young researchers. Her dream is for a Maths A-level in market research!
The social side
The Editor with Joe Jordan and Jim Whaley from our sponsors Ovation MR
It was a lovely warm evening and there was a buzz in the air as people met friends and colleagues and took their drinks and food through to the wide, open-air terrace overlooking the Aldwych. A great evening reflecting a great year.
Talking to Jim and Joe of OvationMR
After the Summer Party Phyllis Vangelder talked to Jim Whaley, CEO and Joe Jordan, COO of our Sponsor OvationMR.
PV We are so pleased to have you as Sponsor of the Summer Party. What is it about AMSR that attracts you?

Jim Whaley
JW As an AMSR company partner, we fully believe and support your mission of protecting and archiving history over the decades the research industry has existed.
Our mission statement as a company has always been “To expand opportunities for researchers to do the work they believe in and can stand behind, for their company, their community, and their cause”. Our purpose is to democratise information. We want to drive and allow access to information, enabling people to do more than they believed they could do. We’ve always had a vision to help empower researchers in a way that ‘their reach should exceed their grasp’.
When we expanded our involvement in the UK market, we didn’t want to do it just in a commercial way. Of course, we wanted to be successful, but we were also looking to be a part of the community and partner with associations and organisations that were doing something for the community and society.
We are proud to collaborate with the AMSR and support this event and its noble cause of defining the history of market research embedded within the history of the UK through market research. We support the cause of leveraging these past datasets to inform and align future social and commercial progress. We share similar core values in expanding knowledge, collaboration, and data integrity.
The Archive documents and enlightens the societal changes within British life since the ‘50s, touching on all aspects of our social, political, personal, and commercial lives. The Archive tracks the evolution of change, providing consumer insight and societal viewpoints on what has happened over generations.
How did you first become associated with AMSR?
Adam asked if we would like to sponsor the 2022 Event, and we were delighted to become an Exclusive Sponsor. Our overarching mission is to be viewed as contributing to the industry. We want to be an equal partner in enriching the community. It was great to be welcomed so warmly.
I am a second-generation market researcher: My mother, Marilynn Whaley, was a researcher and I remember product samples for testing being delivered into our garage as a young person and pulling telephone samples from a local phone directory and writing them onto call sheets. So I was indoctrinated into the business from an early age. Joe and I have a close affinity with Adam and Phyllis, sharing their passion and concern for good quality research. We recognise that the Archive is a repository of the best thinking about research, with peer reviewing of all the contents that are accepted.
There was great fellowship and collaboration within the close-knit research community of the’ 70s and ’80s. In fact, this ethos underpins the dedication of the volunteers. Was it the same ethos in the US?
Yes, we recognise this in the US, and also globally.
Whom do you see as users in the US? How do you compare the target market for users? Do you think they differ in the two countries?
High School students are a little young. However, OvationMR often get college students coming to them asking for data, not just in the US but in other parts of the world. College students could certainly be a target, especially business and marketing majors.
There is a culture in the US for research companies to do their own research and archiving. They have their own tools They might be interested in using our Archive data, but still be reluctant to offer data to the Archive. This is a challenge to give them a different brand vision, which is possible through leadership by example.
Do you have any advice on the way we disseminate our work to potential users?
Perhaps there is an opportunity for AMSR to be more pro-active in disseminating its work to the British press. However, this year there were certainly more posts and re-posts about the Event than last year.
There are opportunities to promote to other markets. I would like to see more global coverage: the broader the market scope the more successful AMSR will become.
I think that AMSR in the UK should undertake a PR campaign with industry leaders and attempt to get client support. Surely companies like P & G and others could release historical data from the ‘50s.
What do you see as the differences between UK and US research?
People like hard data in the US. But qual is having a come-back as people are seeing the value of qual for a back story and a more rounded and in-depth view of the consumer. There is nowadays a much more hybrid approach. Ovation’s use of AI to probe open-ended interviews is an opportunity. It is reminiscent of the early days of computer-aided telephone interviewing when you could probe the open-end question for key attributes and mentions. Users of the Archive in future decades will be able to trace how technical developments impacted on research methodology.
What are your hopes in our relationship?
We are looking forward to deepening our relationship with AMSR. We want to use the Archive to enrich our own research, and we hope to position ourselves as users at Global Conferences, on our website, and hopefully publishing joint papers in industry journals.
I should like to write a paper about the differences as shown in the Archive. I would hope to get it into journals like Quirk Marketing Review or the Journal of Marketing.
The Archive could also liaise with MRI (The Market Research Institute) which runs training courses and be part of their material on sources. I should like to think we are partners in disseminating the values and passions of AMSR.
Ovation would like to be seen not just as a sponsor and commercial associate but as a high-quality trusted partner, having relationships with friends and colleagues here, and working collaboratively for the good of the industry. We see the idea of the Archive as a way of empowering research to move to a broader scope: encouraging continuity and historical context. We value that a lot. It’s a ‘Great Day for Discovering Why’.
Joint Mass Observation / AMSR Webinar
Exploring the Archives: Researching the Narrative of Happiness and the History of Feeling
A highly successful joint Mass-Observation/AMSR Webinar, the first of its kind, was held on 3 May, demonstrating the synergy which both organisations, through their archives, can bring to information sourcing.
Chairing the session, Suzanne Rose, Mass Observation Engagement Officer, explained the purpose of the Webinar, showcasing the work of the two organisations.
She introduced the speakers, beginning with Jessica Scantlebury, MO Archivist, and Kirsty Pattrick, its Research Manager, representing Mass Observation and Phyllis Macfarlane, Head of Contents, representing AMSR, who described the work of their respective organisations. They were followed by two academic social and cultural researchers, who have used both Archives in their research: Professor Claire Langhamer, Director of the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, who specialises in the history of everyday lives, especially the experiences of women and Dr David Tross, Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck University. He is the academic lead on the National Lottery Funded Community course for Newham Residents and has contributed to two books in the recent AMSR series on ‘Showcasing the Archive’.
MO Archive
The first part of the Webinar focused on the Mass-Observation Archive.
Jessica Scantlebury, MO Archivist, set out the context to the Mass Observation Archive – its history, mission and what it does today.
Mass Observation was a social research organisation that was set up in 1937. Its early phase of activity was from 1937 until the 1960s, but it is most famous for its work capturing life on the home front during the Second World War.
Mass Observation was keen to develop a method and anthropology to document everyday life in Britain. It announced its formation and mission in the pages of the New Statesman in January 1937 under the heading ‘Anthropology of the home’.
It was jointly written by three eclectically talented young men: Tom Harrisson (an anthropologist and ornithologist), Humphrey Jennings (a painter and filmmaker) and Charles Madge (a poet and Daily Mirror journalist). It called on volunteers to cooperate in a research project, that would create a mass ‘science of ourselves’. Its list of suggested topics for investigation read like a surrealist poem on the hidden strangeness of mundane life: “shouts and gestures of motorists … behaviour of people at war memorials … anthropology of football pools … bathroom behaviour … female taboos about eating”.
To capture ‘Life in Britain;’ MO had a two-pronged approach which involved a volunteer panel of writers who responded to open-ended question and wrote diaries and a panel of investigators (sometimes paid) who conducted detailed studies into a range of topics.
The original MO movement collected 2,500 archival sized boxes of material during its first phase of activity. This material is publicly accessible and can be viewed in the reading rooms at The Keep, an archive centre for Sussex University based just outside of Brighton. The material can also be accessed online. This isn’t open access, but institutional access normally through a university subscription, or it can be accessed online in person at the British Library. This resource is called Mass Observation Online and is published by a company called Adam Matthew digital.
The material varies in format. A panel of volunteer writers from across the UK were recruited to write diaries and respond to open-ended questionnaires. These documents vary in length and in style and can be handwritten or typed. Studies and quantitative surveys were conducted by investigators, and again these documents can vary in style. At times they may be recordings of overheard conversations, or recording in detail the activity in a dancehall, including how dance partners held each other! Official documents and ephemera were among the material collected, so the archive is rich in this resource.
Mass Observation published around 25 books during the late 1930s and 1940s. Most were commercially available and widely circulated.
Jessica went on to talk about the Mass Observation Project database. Users approach Mass Observation in a variety of ways. The length of time Mass Observers have been writing for, the breadth of topics and how these are repeated makes for a multiplicity of uses.
To help researchers navigate the collections MO has a database which allows you to search across the Directives from 1981 and undertake searches by key meta-data such as gender, region or age. From this you can download who has responded, which helps to make in-roads to the material.
This database enables you to find out biographical information about the Mass Observation writers – their age, gender, regional location and information about occupation. It would be possible to use this database to follow a Mass Observation writer longitudinally – or compare the response with a number of Directives to develop a sample of Mass Observation writing cohort. Several writers and academics have used the Mass Observation Project in these ways.
The current Wellcome bid, about which Kirsty Pattrick talks about below, is enhancing this database to include the Covid 19 Collection.
Mass Observation Project
Kirsty Patrick described the Project, which was re-established in 1981, showing how today Mass Observation continues to generate narrative material through its national panel of volunteer writers.
The volunteers are self-selecting and remain anonymous, beyond key biographical data. The panel has continued to be nurtured for over 40 years, with a handful of volunteers contributing since the start. Some write for a few years, others for decades. Over these years a relationship of trust has grown.
Anonymity is given with each writer having a reference number. This is crucial as feedback has shown that many would either not contribute or not write so openly if it wasn’t anonymous. There are many factors which motivate Mass Observers to contribute: the joy of writing, to leave a legacy or to write for history – certainly a big drive for those who joined during Covid-19. For others it’s being part of social research; volunteers have commented on the value of being part of something bigger, the power of being a voice amongst many.
Three times a year, in Spring, Summer, and Autumn, MO mails out a Directive to the panel. There is a commission fee for collaborating on a Directive as the researcher is buying into a relationship that Mass Observation has nurtured. The Directive research team collaborate with MO to co-construct the questions and ensure that anyone, whatever their age or life experience, can contribute.
The latest Spring Directive contained three themes. Part 1 was on the ’Cost of living and intergenerational relationships’. Part 2 was on ‘Magic and rituals’ and Part 3 was the Coronation.
The broad themes within which MO Directive themes fall parallel to AMSR’s focus of interest.
As with the original MO movement, everyday life is captured within these themes from an individual perspective through people’s thoughts, opinions and observations. The topics seek to generate responses which situate the Observers in the present but also ask them to reflect back. and look forward. Themes are repeated both within the contemporary project but also comparatively with the earlier phase of Mass Observation.
Covid-19
MO is currently working on a Wellcome-funded project to make available its Observations relating to Covid-19 collection. Throughout the pandemic it generated 10,000 documents which include diaries and artwork in response to Directives and open calls to the public.
AMSR
Phyllis Macfarlane, AMSR Head of Contents, outlined the history of the Archive and summarised what it contains i.e. conference papers, newsletters, historic developments in the industry, documents relating to methods and training, MORI and NOP Opinion Polls; media/audience research as well as special collections such as the CRAM Collection of Qualitative Research and the Ehrenberg and Goodhardt Collection.
She discussed the ways in which the AMSR collections are complementary to the MO Archive. MassObs is very much about individuals’ lives and experiences; AMSR is more of a summary of how things were for typical people or different groups of people.
Examples of topics include: The effect of inflation on housewives; What cat-owners think about their cats; The general public’s opinions of Mrs Thatcher over time; How attitudes to the Royal Family have changed; Trends in eating habits; Attitudes to convenience foods in the 1970s and Teenagers – how they have changed.
Phyllis pointed to AMSR’s Contents Committee’s remit to collect and curate content which will be of value to future generations of social historians. AMSR ‘s plans for the future are to identify and collect as much heritage material as possible; to grow ‘contemporary’ collections by stimulating the flow of more modern research into the Archive and to develop greater usage of the Archive by marketers, historians, other academics and schoolchildren.
She outlined some of the subject areas in the Archive which could be of help to users:
Historic data/information on products and brands; Research methods and approaches; Case stories – especially qualitative; Academic papers on advertising, brand, segmentation and Media collections (e.g. BBC Audience Research).
Data on topics such as food trends; photography; pets; women travellers and royalty are only some of the areas that can be found in the Archive.
AMSR has been helping Modern British History A-Level students, who have to write a 5,000 word dissertation in their coursework to address questions such as:
- How far did Britain become a ‘permissive society’ in the 1960s?
- How effectively did British governments deal with issues of race relations and immigration in the 1960s?
- Assess the reasons for Britain’s attempts to join the EEC in the years 1961 to 1973
- assess the reasons for Margaret Thatcher’s downfall in 1990.
Phyllis stressed that the Archive has lots of material for them. From an initial pilot among schools known to volunteers, at the time of the Webinar, AMSR already had four schools actively using the Archive and there are plans to recruit many more.
She concluded by presenting specific examples of qualitative and quantitative data from the Archive:
- The quantitative data related to Attitudes to the Royal family. Data covered 1991-2000 showing responses to the question ‘On balance do you think Prince Charles will make a good king or a bad king when he comes to the throne in the future?’
The responses to a question posed in 1969 to the question: ‘When Prince Charles marries do you think he would choose a British girl or a foreign princess or does it matter which?’ were broken down by age.
- The qualitative example from the Great Inflation period of the ‘70s focused on women and inflation, particularly on treats and doing without as prices spiraled. Quotes like the following provide rich data about feelings: “The rising costs make me irritable to know I can’t get what I’ve been used to getting. Little things like going to the hairdressers – I used to go every week”.
Researching happiness and the history of feeling
A major focus of Professor Claire Langhamer’s research is the history of everyday life and of feelings, especially the experiences of women, so her presentation on the use of the Archives for her research on happiness and feeling, the core of this Webinar, was particularly insightful.
She enthused about the Archives, for MO for its large collection of subjective responses, and for AMSR, whose digitised history of modern Britain she described as ‘superb’.
She traced the founding ethos of Mass Observation in 1937, which was to do something new and different, looking at ordinary people’s everyday lives, at a time when their views were not always considered. MO’s self-conscious methodology was quite different from orthodox social and market research of this period, which was based on rigorous, academic techniques. Indeed, in 1951 the market research guru Mark Abrams, made a stinging attack of the MO methodology. MO’s methodological departure from traditional research was viewed with suspicion by politicians as well as researchers. But the founders were very clear about what they were doing. Their intention was to work with new subjective methods, making use not only of the trained scientific observer, but the untrained observer, the ‘man in the street’. The observers were subjective ‘cameras’. Ideally, it was the observation of everybody, by everybody, including themselves. The avowed message was to get different types of people to respond.
Claire Langhamer went on to describe the specific research on which her paper was based. She used a MO project from 1937-40 which focused on the town of Bolton, exploring every aspect of its residents’ life, particularly what constituted happiness for them. In 1938 MO held an essay competition in which they asked people to describe what happiness meant to them. Claire discussed competitions as a methodology. They often had cash prizes, so this attracted more working- class people. 226 letters about happiness were received in the competition (some including poems) and they provided rich autobiographical material about people’s emotional lives and a chorus about their life experiences. Follow-up questionnaires attempted to rank the factors making for happiness, with security having the highest scores and politics the lowest.
MO used a huge range of methodologies, including listening to people, and engaging people in conversations. Claire Langhamer commented on the rich graphical detail that emerged from this ‘sideways’ approach to data gathering (she acknowledged that some of the methodological ethics might seem questionable today).
She cited further work done by MO in 1942 which she has used in her research on emotion. People were asked to comment on their emotional feelings about world events, providing deep reflective material on collective and personal feelings. For a historian of emotions ‘this was a gift’.
She closed by talking about the similarities between the Archives of MO and AMSR. They were both interesting, eclectic and reflective. She had found two particular issues of the 1950s on which both Archives held data (there are surely very many others): the relationship of Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend; and capital punishment. Both give rich insight into people’s attitudes at the time of data collection. They are both invaluable assets for longitudinal research.
Happiness research
David Tross’ paper, ‘The recent history of happiness research: insight from two social archives’ described his use of MO and AMSR Archives in his research on happiness. His doctoral research ‘How people across the UK experience and perceive happiness’ used 200 responses to MO’s Observation Project (MOP) in 2013 ‘What is happiness?’.
During Lockdown, for research on identifying ‘attitudes, activities and circumstances’ that acted as mediators of subjective wellbeing during lockdown, he used 24 responses to MO’s ‘Summer 2020 Directive: ‘Covid 19 and Time’.
The AMSR Archive provided a digital literature review of happiness-related research and commentary.
David Tross also wrote chapters, based on his research, for two AMSR publications Showcasing the Archive (‘Happiness: can money buy it?’ In How we’ve changed: social trends from post-war to present day and beyond, 2021 and ‘Measuring happiness: how should wellbeing influence policy’ in Researching the public: post-war policy, politics and polling, 2023).
He cited some of the data he had found in the AMSR Archives including some insightful quotations:
“There is a paradox at the heart of our lives: we are richer but no happier….although living standards have doubled, ..the evidence is that for most types of people in the west, happiness has not increased” (Layard 2011).
“We need intrinsic goals that satisfy us personally, not solely extrinsic goals that fulfil the expectations of society or other people” (Keegan 2006).
David’s data sources included the output of respected market and social research practitioners over many decades from the AMSR Archive including mid-‘80s to mid- ‘90s newsletters and reports from Social Indicators Network (SINET), British Public Opinion survey and The Market Research Society. Findings include: positive correlations between relationships and good health: Denmark is the happiest country in the EU; and the (un)happiness effects of recession in the early 1980s; the countries which suffered the most were those with the least social security. He commented on the U-shape of UK Happiness and age. “What makes you happy changes as you go through life”. (People tend to be happy when they are young, become miserable in middle age, and become happier when they are older).
The MO Archive holds details of the 2013 Happiness Directive ‘What does happiness mean to you?’. Responses cited the complexity of the question: “It’s a difficult question to answer, some things make me happy, but can I describe what happiness is?”.
Several themes emerged:
Holistic (“If life were all up, we should not appreciate it”; “the largely mythical abstractions of people being constantly happy or suffused with happiness over a long period, when the reality is that true happiness is often quite a fleeting emotion”).
Interdependence (“what makes you happy? Other people. What makes you unhappy? Other people”}.
Meaning and purpose (“I suppose happiness doesn’t always have to mean hedonistic happiness”).
Moderation (“moments of happiness are never one continuous chunk”). Observers in the MO surveys commented on ‘critical distance’ in assessing happiness.
One of the questions posed in the MO Bolton Survey was linked to David’s research on money, happiness and anti-materialism. It asked ‘Is happiness directly linked to material possessions and wealth?’ and David linked this to a quotation from Keegan in the AMSR Archive identifying a “rumbling discontent with the values…which underpin materialism” (2006).
Reflecting on the content and method of both Archives and his experience of using them, David concluded with these comments:
- AMSR Archive content: the UK is the leading country in the development and use of survey research to measure people’s behaviour. Such research has become part of everyday life.
- Quality is a bit like happiness. Everyone knows what it is, but none can really define it.
- MO Content: It weaves between registers of personal intimacy and social reportage. It reveals mundane ordinary life in miniature. The non-coercive aspect of the methodology encourages the expression of thoughts and feelings.
- Individual questions are framed in relation to wider contexts.
- AMSR method: “The Archive is a digital resource for everyone and anyone can access it”.
- MO method: “an admittedly …unwieldy resource but one which offers unparalleled access to ways in which social and cultural contexts are played out within and across individual lives”.
Discussion
A Q & A and general discussion session followed the more formal presentations.
Questions included gender differences in feelings about happiness and whether there should be a UK Minister of Happiness. Claire and David both stressed that happiness was not only linked to a good society but to feelings. A government can’t create happiness, but can provide conditions for happiness by minimising suffering. Several Collections of Happiness Data exist, but not data on tangible outcomes.
There was some discussion on the kind of data researchers would like to see in the Archives. David also pointed to research where people were given money to see if this increased their happiness. People were still interested in how much money their peers had – happiness was often linked to variables such as social comparisons, dignity and rewards and punishment mechanisms.
Discussion also covered happiness in the workplace – this was not always a result of financial reward.
In the discussion on methodology, the relative merits of qualitative and quantitative research were considered. The World Happiness Report is quantitative, asking people to rank happiness on a 10-point scale. Both Claire and David felt this is too positivist. Happiness is about feelings, and not usually permanent. There are also well-documented cultural and gender differences in responding to scales. People in the Middle East are often too scared to say they are unhappy and people in some countries are known to find it difficult to give a true response: they want to create a good impression. David asked, ”How could you have a Minister of Happiness in this context?”
Claire Langhamer stressed the positive way in which data from different archives can be used, looking at both the materials and methodologies. Both researchers appreciated the material in the AMSR Archive where writers comment on research, because it throws light on the concerns of researchers at the time and what it may mean for the data collected then. What contemporary researchers write and say adds credibility to their work.
The Webinar provided a fascinating insight into what the Archives contain and the synergy in the way they can be used by researchers.
A video of the Webinar, showing the full presentations (though not the discussion session) is freely available on Mass Observation’s YouTube Channel.
MRS Conference: 'Insight Alchemy'
Judith Staig provides an AMSR perspective on the MRS Conference, ‘Insight Alchemy’. She concludes her article with some of the responses given in an interview with Key Speaker Historian David Olusoga which include some fascinating insights into his use of archives.
I felt very proud to represent the Archive at this year’s MRS Conference, ‘Insight Alchemy’. Not only because AMSR has a lot to say to MRS members, but also because some of the key themes of the conference spoke directly to the work of the AMSR in educating people about our industry, preserving our history and heritage and, most importantly, providing the context of history to help make sense of our world today.
Our marketing and marcomms teams have identified that face-to-face industry conferences are one of the best ways for us to raise our profile and attract new donors, volunteers, contributors of material and other supporters. The AMSR stand, kindly donated by the MRS, was a lively hub during coffee and networking breaks, and we had our two highly-regarded books in the Showcasing the Archive series available for sale – as well as offering a special rate for pre-orders of the upcoming third book, which was published on June 13th. We walked away with book sales, new signups to our mailing list, and a better understanding of just how much the AMSR has to offer to people in our sector.
Whilst most of this activity took place outside the conference rooms there was also a lot going on inside that had relevance to AMSR and our goals. One of the key takeouts from the conference sessions as a whole was the need for researchers to be more confident in being strategic partners to our clients, helping them to make difficult decisions and not just providing data. Those of us with an interest in history would likely argue that is not possible to have a truly informed perspective without a grounding in the context of the past; many of the speakers at Insight Alchemy reinforced this view.
In the excellent opening keynote, Claer Barrett, Consumer Editor at the FT, talked about the generational cognitive blindness experienced by finance people who have only ever known low interest rates. Data from the Archive, such as MORI BPO reports from the bad old days of the late ‘80s, when the base rate ran at 13%+, would do much to help understand how people are likely to feel, think and behave today, as mortgage costs soar.
Our own Phyllis Macfarlane talked about the value of case studies in teaching strategic thinking to young researchers. This is critically important for people entering the industry – as it is for all young people, we could argue. The industry is facing a talent shortage, so we must get good at exciting a new generation of young people about what it would be like to be a researcher. Young researchers are important to AMSR, not only as we are looking to recruit new volunteers, but also because they will be the research leaders of the future and – hopefully – future donors, supporters and contributors to our work.
Andrew Jerina, Head of Research at Flume, spoke, in a panel discussion, about the cyclic nature of the ‘next new thing’ in research. Currently, there is a lot of hype around how AI will revolutionise the industry. But the context of history tells us that we have been here before; we have been told that behavioural science, neuroscience, big data and social listening will all do away with how we work, but the reality is likely to be that, as always, we will separate out what is useful about the new method and incorporate it in what we do. Perhaps in future years we will have another version of our first book, looking at how our methods have changed in the digital era.(link)
Finally, there was the keynote with the excellent David Olusoga. He talked about the historical documents that show the long roots of the false idea that Black people feel less pain – which still has an impact on how people are treated by healthcare professionals today. He said that there is no more important job for historians to do than to show how such pervasive ideas have been constructed, as this is what will help us to dismantle them. We were lucky enough to be able to pose some questions to David, with the support of Katie McQuater of Impact magazine (who published her full interview here).
David said that all historians understand the value of archives and the power of documents from the past, but that television producers used to think that they were dry and dull. But more recently, this myth has been dispelled, largely through programmes such as Who do you think you are, and the trend towards people exploring their own ancestry online, making it possible to use archives and documents in his television work. He also said that the accessibility of digital archives, such as the AMSR, makes them invaluable and while something is lost in the materiality of the document, something is gained in the ease of searching.
I left the conference feeling inspired by what I had heard and proud of the work of the Archive and all our volunteers and supporters. To close, here is the full text of David Olusoga’s answers.
Talking to David Olusoga
AMSR: The AMSR is a resource that allows historians to connect with the views and behaviours of people from the recent past as told to market researchers. How have you used archives in your work and what value have you derived from archives?
DO: I think I’m able to use archives in my work because of something that’s happened in the world of television that was unexpected and I think enormously beneficial, which was that audiences were shown to be not frightened of data and not frightened of archives. When I was a young TV producer in the late ‘90s and noughties whenever you used documents or proposed to use documents in television programmes more senior and more experienced people would tell you the documents were boring or dull or dry. There was always a pejorative attached to documents and attached to archives. Our job was to move away from the written sources, to move away from raw data – not to tell stories but to have a spectacle. If it had been about telling stories, I would have gone with it, but it was about spectacle. The job that you do when you’re a documentary maker lays far more stress on the directing side than on the producing side, far more on the visual flair and the ability to tell stories. Many people in television have absolutely no understanding of how stories work, but lots of understanding of how pictures work. What happened in television, was demonstrated, largely through one programme, Who do you think you are, that audiences were not scared of documents.
So most of what I do is being able to ride the wave of that sort of breach in the wall that was created by that programme. And what it allows me to do is to experiment with what all historians know, which is that documents are some of the most fascinating, most emotional artefacts that we have, and the archives contain billions of human stories and that the common experience for an historian is not simply of dry analysis, but it is an emotional connection with people from the past. That has become something which is not just the preserve of historians but is something which people experience through television programmes. It’s really recent. It was not something that took place in television programmes very much at all until about 10 years ago. A lot of my work and a lot of my passion for history on television is because we’re not frightened of archives anymore. So that gulf between what historians do and what TV historians – TV producers more accurately – have done for many years has begun to shrink. It’s partly Who do you think you are, but it’s partly also something else which is that we are going through the biggest public participatory experience of history and archives that there ever has ever been, which is the genealogy revolution. Yeah, it’s very difficult as a TV executive who believes that documents are boring, dry and dull to say that when millions of people, literally millions, are going online to Find my past or Ancestry or any of the other sites or they’re going down to their local archives and engaging emotionally and personally, with documents. So, we were always wrong. The audience was always more sophisticated than TV claimed but also the genealogy revolution demonstrated that it has that capacity.
AMSR: The AMSR is a digital archive, so it’s accessible to everyone online. And it’s the result of volunteers scanning and logging paper documents online. How have you used digital artefacts in your work and what is the value of those compared with the original documents?
DO: Whenever I possibly can I use digital versions of documents. I subscribe to all of the various sites and I value them absolutely enormously. I value them because they allow you to deconstruct documents in ways that is much more difficult and time-consuming using paper documents. Now, I think there is probably something lost in not having the materiality of the document, but I think it’s outweighed by what by is gained, obviously being able to word search. But it’s more than that. It’s about being able to see, in one screen or a few screens, being able to see various ways in which within a single text an issue is addressed, to see the hypocrisy or the duality of some writers, to see the struggles within an individual text around one issue. It is much harder to see that with 200 pages of text in between.
So I think there’s some good research into how people engage with digital documents. But I think that the work that I’ve done both as a writer and as a television historian has been enormously helped by the digitisation of those resources.
Oxford Bodleian History Thesis Fair
Three go to Oxford – Joe Murat, Phyllis Vangelder and Judith Wardle at the Oxford History Thesis Fair
Judith Wardle describes our day at the Fair
While Joe valiantly struggled to carry our exhibition banners across town, Phyllis and I met in the sunshine outside the church of St Mary the Virgin, opposite the impossibly beautiful Radcliffe Camera. The draconian traffic restrictions in Oxford meant that it was impossible to bring our material in by car, Joe had to park the car outside town. The centre of Oxford was virtually traffic free and eerily quiet as a result.
The Oxford History Undergraduate Fair was a rag taggle of stalls lining the walls of one of the examination rooms close by and our Archive had a prime position. We were next to the Bodleian map and chart library, over the way from an archive of legal history, and just down the way from Biography. We could see all the geographical archives over the other side of the room. It offered students a chance to explore around their chosen subjects and to see if the information existed to do the research needed. They would need to change or amend their titles in the light of the data resources available. It’s chicken and egg when it comes to setting thesis questions.
Students began drifting in and we did our best to catch their eyes and ask them the key question, ‘what era are you interested in?’, a question which immediately identified our potential users. Students interested in ‘contemporary’ era (ie post 1945) were genuinely bowled over by the Archive’s content which slotted so well with their subjects. There are few such comprehensive archives as ours that relate to contemporary times. We quickly learnt not to use the word ’modern’ because this covers earlier times, beginning around 1500. The enthusiasm in the room was infectious and we found ourselves caught up with their excitement. ‘Wow’, said one visitor to our stall when we showed him the breadth of our collections. Marketing, as we know, is all about understanding decision-making and catching people as they make those decisions. This was a room full of people who were dwelling on their subject questions, searching and sifting for the best angle to take, and here we were, engaging with them at the optimum time.
As we have found before, there was a huge amount of interest in gender. This time not just about women and their changing roles in public and domestic life, but about men, too. The first person I spoke to was interested in Masculinity and Glam Rock. When I said my husband had played in a glam rock band, her eyes widened. It wasn’t the only time we three felt we were history, having lived through times we shall soon find described in theses and history books. There were so many subjects we discussed with the students: many were interested in the politics of the Seventies, Mary Quant and fashion in the Sixties, the Iranian revolution in 1979 amongst other subjects. Yes, we were there, too !
Recent Additions To The Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane writes
Lots of material keeps on coming in – either digitally, or on paper, to our scanning office, which is very kindly loaned to us by IPSOS in Harrow.
Guinness Advertising from Alan Hedges
We’ve mentioned previously that we’ve retrieved a lot of material from Alan Hedges’ attic, and we are working our way through the scanning. We’ve recently uploaded a collection of JWT annual proposals for Guinness advertising during the 1970s. It’s interesting in that the earliest ones don’t recognise women drinking beer independently and refer to ‘housewives and husbands’. But by the end of the ‘70s they had data which showed that women were drinking and buying in their own right and developed the advertising accordingly, and husbands and housewives are no longer mentioned. Some things have changed over time! Is the advertising world the most attuned to social change, perhaps? Some reports containing solely copies of advertisements (together with the dates which they were run) we have donated to HAT, which has a fine collection of Guinness ads and it seems best to keep them all together.
Kantar Insights Reports
Some things may have changed, but then many haven’t. We have a recent donation of reports from Kantar Insights. Three from their ‘Winning over Women series’ – on the financial services industry. I found ‘Winning over Wealth – Women’s attitudes to finance and investment’ (1) particularly interesting as it highlights how great the financial gap still is between men and women – even young women don’t have the same financial confidence as men. It really is time these sorts of attitudes changed.
Other reports from Kantar now in the Archive include: ‘Redefining the Menopause’ (2); ‘Doing the right thing authentically – a report on how brands could go right or wrong’, activating around the Pride festival’ (3); ‘COVID 19 Barometer State of the Nation series’ comprising eight presentations from webinars hosted throughout the spring and summer of 2020. It’s fascinating to see again the progression of feelings and opinions about the Pandemic over time – look at the first one and relive March 2020.(4)
GWI Reports
We also have a series of modern reports from GWI ‘Commerce: GWI’s flagship 2021 report’ on the latest trends in commerce (5) – Buy Now Pay Later services reaching a new level of maturity. ’Also: ’The gaming playbook: everything you want to know about the gaming audience (2021)’(6) – largest growth in Gamers 2018-2020 is in 55-64 year olds: +32%. Who knew!; The global media landscape: analysing how the pandemic has changed global media habits’ (7); GWI’s flagship report on the latest trends in social media (2022) (8); and ‘United Kingdom: key digital behaviours and trends over time and across demographics’ (9) – we watch a lot more linear TV than the global average, and some interesting attitudes to COVID Vaccines from October 2021, by age.
Peter Bartram and Cricket
We were planning to do a story on Cricket in honour of the forthcoming Ashes series – we’d found some nice material in the Archive including a project on a potential Cricket part-work in the CRAM Collection – but as we were discussing it, Peter Bartram suddenly remembered that he’d done a study for the MCC in 1966 – and he then found it at the back of a cupboard. It’s one of those wonderful studies that shows that nothing ever really changes, Enjoy the nostalgia.(10).
The Dark Ages of Market Research? Do you have any material?
Presenting to the Master’s Students at Kings College, London, recently, I became aware that their interests really are quite ‘contemporary’ – definitely more Tony Blair than Mrs. Thatcher. And it made me remember something that we have been aware of for quite some time – which is that we have an increasingly obvious ‘dark’ spot in the Archive as we approach the late ‘90s and early 2000s – the time when we were reporting digitally – but hadn’t yet sorted out how we archived our files. We do find companies who admit that they have trouble retrieving reports from that time – before we all got it sorted out.
So, I’d like to make a special plea to anyone reading this far – if you know you have material on strange, outmoded storage devices or are about to delete material from that time – please do consider donating it to the Archive – what academics and students want is becoming ever more recent. It will probably be used sooner than you think. And any interesting material that you still have at the back of a cupboard or in an attic – please do root it out for us and send it in.
Links to reports mentioned:
- Winning over wealth (women’s attitudes to finance and investment) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Redefining the menopause – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Doing the right thing with authenticity: how to be a socially relevant brand in uncertain times [how brands should meet consumer demands such as diversity and inclusion] – Company Reports & PR – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Kantar Covid-19 Barometer webinar, Wave 1 (fieldwork March 13-18 2020) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Commerce: GWI’s flagship report on the latest trends in commerce – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The gaming playbook: everything you want to know about the gaming audience – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- The global media landscape: analysing how the pandemic has changed global media habits – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- Social: GWI’s flagship report on the latest trends in social media – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- United Kingdom: key digital behaviours and trends over time and across demographics – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
- NOP National Cricket Survey – NOP Reports – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org)
Newsletter No. 1, 2023
Letter from the Editor
I have been listening to broadcasts from the BBC Archive – Our Archive Century, a series marking one hundred years of the BBC through the riches to be found in the Corporation’s broadcasts. The material it contains is tucked away and preserved in a temperature-controlled room, but it is safe and available at the touch of a key.
The commentators suggest that this Archive provides the texture of the everyday world. And, of course, we see analogies with our own Archive: We too have a wealth of material on British Elections and public affairs, particularly in the Collections such as MORI British Public Opinion, NOP Reports and other Opinion Poll reports.
Like the BBC Archive our survey and reports cover people’s attitudes and behaviour in real time and in contemporary language. This is particularly true of the qualitative material that so often includes ‘verbatims’. In addition to the valuable CRAM collection from Peter Cooper we are building up collection of very impressive qualitative work. Wendy Sykes and I are sorting Alan Hedges’ life-spanning collection of research (see ‘Alan’s Attic in this issue) and among the vast number of reports, are many chronicling insightful qualitative studies. Please, if you have any such material, donate it to the Archive (of if you prefer, it can be loaned to us, while it is being scanned and catalogued and added to the Archive collections, and then returned to you).
We have embarked on an important outreach project, targeted at schools, to increase the use of the Archive by A-level students. Phyllis Macfarlane outlines our exciting initial programme.
Anyone who listens to Tim Harford’s ‘More or less’ which explains, and sometimes debunks, the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life, knows how tricky the interpretation of statistics can be. Tony Dent’s initiative for Better Statistics is an important project for our industry. He and Phyllis Macfarlane report on the recent Conference, ’Measuring Success for Business, Society and the Environment’ and examine its wide-ranging agenda, including the digital revolution, sustainability, well-being and the role of economics in the political debate.
Don’t forget to look at the ‘Latest Additions’ piece. This is now a regular feature on our website and in the Newsletter. Please keep your contributions to the Archive collections coming.
Mass Observation/AMSR Joint Webinar
Unfortunately, this exciting joint event ‘Exploring the Archives: Researching the narrative of happiness and the history of feeling’, which was due to be held 15 February, had to be postponed, due to industrial action by university personnel.
We are delighted to announce that the Webinar has been re-scheduled for 3 May – at a new time of 2-4 pm.
The Event will be chaired by Suzanne Rose, MO’s Engagement Manager. The introductory speakers include Kirsty Pattrick, MO Research Manager and Jessica Scantlebury MO Archivist, and Phyllis Macfarlane, Head of AMSR Collections, followed by two academics who have both used the archives in their research: Professor Claire Langhamer, Director of the Institute of Historical Research and Dr David Tross, Associate Lecturer. Birkbeck University of London. The Webinar will be an opportunity for conversation, discovery and revelation.
We have already seen a great deal of interest in the Webinar. If you have already registered for the Event, you will, of course, be informed of the new date. Full details are on the AMSR website.
AMSR Schools A-Level Project
Phyllis Macfarlane presents an update of our outreach programme for schools
We have three more schools on board since our last Newsletter – getting through to the right person is tricky – but once we do they are very positive. After all they are very keen to get pupils to use different sources – and we are easy-to-use, digital and free – so there’s a lot to like! Some schools even have librarians to help pupils identify sources.
In addition to Modern British History, we have now written ‘crib sheets’ for students of A-Levels in Sociology (gender studies, crime and religion), Politics (development of political parties and do opinion polls work(!)) and Psychology (research methods). And we have also tackled the EPQ (Extended Project Qualification). This latter was the most difficult as we had no idea of typical topics – but the internet (where else?) had lots of suggestions and we chose one that seemed appropriate for us: Has the British Public lost interest In the Royal Family since World War 2?
You have no idea how much we have on attitudes to the monarchy and the royal family in the Archive – and not only in the MORI and NOP collections, as you would expect – but in the CRAM collection we have some qualitative research projects about the possibility of launching a part-work type magazine on the Royal Family: here’s one of the reports: Dog Tag: a qualitative evaluation/magazine on the Royal Family – it tells you an awful lot about public attitudes in 1983.
We are also looking into the possibility of running an email campaign to all secondary schools. If we can get 30-50 schools on board it will greatly boost our user numbers. Some of the pupils will go on to University and use the Archive in their degrees, and then the next school year will take it up…as they have at Notting Hill and Ealing High School… Once we are used in a school we can introduce other topics: survey research methods and data analysis, for example.
Watch this space!
Latest additions to the Archive
Phyllis Macfarlane writes
We’ve had many fascinating additions to the Archive in the last few months.
From Qa Research a study done for the Prince’s Trust in 2006 on ‘Breaking the Cycle of Offending’. A real consultation with the real people involved – young criminals. Asking them what they need to happen to stop them re-offending, with simple, straight-forward recommendations to prevent them going straight back into crime on leaving prison. All social research should be like this. Breaking the cycle of offending: making the views of young people count: good ideas wanted – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive.
And also from Qa Research a 2011 survey of Group Travel Organisers on the current market and the future of Group Travel – for those of you interested in tourism in general. National Group Travel Report 2011 – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive (oclc.org); National Group Travel Organiser Research 2011 (charts) – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive.
Emotions & The Impact on Advertising Effectiveness is a paper from Dianne Newman of Research and Analysis of Media (RAM) 2022. It considers two important questions: ‘How can emotions drive advertising effectiveness?’ and ‘Which emotions have the most impact in terms of engaging the audience, and prompting them to take action?’ There are interesting conclusions! Emotions & the Impact on Advertising Effectiveness – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive.
More from the Gordon Heald Collection:
‘Survey of US Teenagers’, a 1985 study for BBC Television covers the attitudes of US Teenagers to Nuclear Warfare, their opinion of the chances of the US surviving a nuclear attack (65% said ‘Poor’) – and their own personal chance of surviving a nuclear attack (66% thought their chance ‘Poor’). It’s easy to forget now, knowing what we do, how serious we believed the Cold War was, in the 1980s. Survey of US Teenagers – Reports of projects – The AMSR Online Archive.
If you’ve ever seriously wondered about the outcome of the 1997 Election – not so much why Tony Blair won – history tends to be written by the victors after all, and there were many who claimed to be architects of New Labour – but why the conservatives lost, then this report: ‘The HSBA Panel of 1000 Conservative voters 1994-97 – Why the Tories failed at the 1997 Election’ will enlighten you from a Tory voter’s point of view. Some interesting results on the debate around the single currency, problems with the NHS(!), sleaze(!!) and a comparison of attitudes to Major and Blair. What very different times they were, and yet so similar! I’d even forgotten that it was Major who lost! HSBC panel of 1000 Conservative voters 1994-1997: why the Tories failed in the 1997 election (presentation) – Opinion Poll Reports – The AMSR Online Archive.
And thirdly The Soul of Britain at the Millennium, a WAPOR paper by Gordon Heald will surprise you with the facts as to how many Britons believed in Heaven, Hell and the Devil (52%, 28% and 32% in case you don’t want to read the whole report). The Soul of Britain at the Millennium – Papers and Offprints – The AMSR Online Archive.
And last but definitely not least – we are very lucky to have reports from the very first days of Readership Research.
Through a chance encounter at a conference where someone said to me – oh, a very good friend of mine’s Father and Uncle were famous market researchers – I’ll put you in touch with him – we have been fortunate enough to be given copies of what are probably the first newspaper readership studies in the UK: from 1928: Press Circulation Analysed and from 1934: An Analysis of Press Circulations.
In the introduction to the 1928 study, Harry Lyall, founder of the London Research and Information Bureau (in 1921), tells us all about its inception:
In the course of six years’ work on market research, that is, six years devoted to studying the buying habits of the public, the problem of investigating the reading habits of the public has been constantly in our minds. What do the middle-classes, the well-to-do, the comfortably-off read? What do the less-well-to-do, those who have not a middle-class income, but have many buying habits in common with the well-to-do, viz: the lower-middle-classes – read? What do the steadier working classes read? These are questions we have often asked ourselves and have often heard asked by others. Our research work among consumers into the distribution of products by class of buyer and by area gave us confidence that the same method could be applied to the distribution of newspapers and periodicals.
The introduction later defines class:
By class we mean buying capacity-plus social outlook. By middle-class we mean the well-to-do and the comfortably-off. By lower middle-class we mean people whose buying capacity is much more limited than the middle-class, but whose social outlook and buying habits are somewhat similar to those of people in that class. By working-class we mean the steadier types of workers. Slum areas and very poor neighbourhoods were not touched by this investigation.
The market for the data was Advertisers: to provide Practitioners in Advertising with material which will enable them to plan advertising campaigns with a more exact knowledge of the degree of coverage of different social classes and areas which can be obtained by the use of various newspapers and periodicals.
The outcome was a study of 20,140 interviews – with trained interviewers – who interviewed housewives about the reading habits of their families.
The sheer scale and detail of the project is astonishing – mostly because, you have to ask yourself – how on earth, in 1928, did they manage all that data and analysis? Answer – they used a firm of Chartered Accountants! It took several months. They went to a lot of trouble.
The 1934 report is similar – they clearly had done the survey annually in-between. I personally found the 1934 report more interesting because Bolton is one of the sampled areas. If, like me, you tend to gravitate to data on your own birthplace – I went straight to the top newspapers read in Bolton…
I found that in 1934 the Bolton Evening News was read by 73.7% of Bolton households. The Empire News (a Weekly) by 44.8%, The People by 23.9%, The Daily Herald by 16.7 % and the Radio Times by 16.1%.
At a national level the top four in 1934 were: the News of the World (40.72%), The People (34.5%), The Daily Herald (25.4%) and the Radio Times (22.04%).
The data were analysed by duplication (cross-readership) and social class and come with very detailed explanations as to how the numbers should be read.
The 1928 report doesn’t include Bolton, unfortunately, and the top papers are quite different: the News of the World was no 1 with readership of 20.75 %, The Daily Mail no 2 with 23.17%, The Sunday Pictorial third with 16.1%, and John Bull 10.7%. The People had only 8.68%. The Radio Times wasn’t mentioned (it had been launched in 1923).
Being a cynic, I, of course, wondered about the accuracy – but then I remembered that a lot happened in the world between 1928 and 1934 – especially in the world of publishing and newspapers.
These two reports are a gift to anyone wanting to write a history of readership research or of their local press.
I’ll be contacting the Bolton Evening News shortly….
Alan's Attic
Wendy Sykes and Phyllis Vangelder on clearing Alan Hedges’ attic
The photos below show us in the late Alan Hedges’ attic in his beautiful house in Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. Although it was a lovely drive up through the English countryside, we have seen nothing of the village. These photos were taken on our second full day: there is at least one more day’s sorting to do, possibly two. Alan’s lifework covers the whole space of the attic and we are endeavouring to sort, list and review it for the Archive. We feel immensely privileged to play a part in preserving not just the books and reports that he wrote, but in reviewing his work, becoming acutely aware of the high quality of his research and the thinking behind every project he undertook. And it is also prescient: there are reports about air pollution, green issues, waste reduction etc. long before they were of mass media interest.
We are attempting to segment the research into three areas: the vast amount of investigative and assessment work he undertook for local and central government and NGOs, commercial and market research, and a specific sector, the drinks industry, particularly for Guinness.
Alan maintained detailed records of all the projects he worked on; carefully packed into boxes and the earliest of these include paperwork which would now be kept in digital folders. Although confidential material has been removed, it is still possible in some of these earlier archives to trace the arc of a project; from initial enquiry and development of the brief through every subsequent stage of execution and delivery.
We should like to thank Alan’s children, Karen and Steve, for donating Alan’s material to the Archive. This will ensure it is not lost. It is available for researchers and scholars to read, to learn from, and appreciate and respect the kind of analytical thinking and insight that underlies all good research.
Urgent! Volunteers required
Isn’t it wonderful to have a have an in-person Conference once again? To meet face-to-face and have live contact with colleagues and friends?
This years’ MRS Conference will be a live one-day event on 14 March at the Hilton Bankside Hotel, 2-8 Gt Suffolk Street, SE1.
The theme of ‘Insight Alchemy’ will enable countless stories of excellence in research to be presented, showing how base data can be turned into golden nuggets of insight that can transform business, public institutions and society.
Phyllis Macfarlane is taking part in a panel discussion about strategy. She will talk about understanding ‘context’- the background and history of the product or service – to the development of strategic thinking, a context that can so often be found in the rich collections of the Archive.
The Growth Event: Is 2.5% growth compatible with modern values?
Phyllis Macfarlane and Tony Dent report from A Better Statistics CIC Event held at the Royal Statistical Society on 30 November 2022
COVID-19 and Brexit have already changed the way we live and work, with more change expected as we react to their lingering effects and seek a zero carbon, sustainable future. Even by November 2022 it was clear that a 2.5% growth agenda was not realistic, or indeed desirable. The purpose of the Better Statistics CIC event held on 30 November 2022 was therefore planned to look closely at the data and explore alternatives.
With contributions from industry, academia and the Office for National Statistics – including keynotes from Ian Cass of the Forum for Private Business and Geoff Tily from the Trades Union Council – the one-day Conference held at The Royal Statistical Society provided a wide-ranging review of progress on measuring these effects and their implications for policy and for business.
The agenda covered such issues as:
- AI and the Digital Revolution, what will be the effects?
- Sustainability and the influence of Global Warming
- Measuring well-being and welfare, with a view to redefining GDP
- Updating the National Business Statistics, to meet modern requirements.
The final session providing a duologue of Sir John Curtice and Sir Vince Cable to discuss the role of economics in the political debate – or is it the role of politics in the economic debate?
Setting the scene, Keynote speaker Ian Cass, MD of the Forum of Private Businesses, made a strong case for Microbusinesses (1-9 employees) to be consulted and listened to more by Government. The challenges small businesses face are enormous – they can help design policy – but not if the government ignores them, and only hears the voice of big business. A lot of money could have been saved on the Covid bounce-back loans if only the government had listened to the advice of small businesses. Change creates gaps and workload. It’s difficult for small businesses without resources to adapt and keep up. He argued for Government to make it easier to do business, and a level playing field.
Geoff Tilly, Senior Economist, Trades Union Council, presented a thought-provoking paper on ‘Real Pay and the (lack of) Growth’. He demonstrated that we are in the worst pay crisis since the Napoleonic wars! The supply view is that weak pay is a consequence of weak productivity. On the other hand, the demand side view is that weak productivity is a consequence of weak pay.
The first session,‘ Business and Labour Market Transformation Plans’, saw David Freeman (ONS, Head of Labour Market and Households), and Craig Taylor (ONS, Lead for Business Statistics Transformation) talk us through the enormous task that ONS is currently undertaking to reform and update all the national business statistics, driven by quality concerns across the R&D statistics, increasing disparity between ONS and HMRC statistics, the availability of new data sources, the levelling up agenda and end-user pressure. The Labour Force Survey is being developed with the aims of reducing bias, reducing attrition and increasing response. Improving the respondent experience and better user engagement are also critical.
The second session looked at ‘Productivity’, a contentious issue in the UK. Professor Jonathan Portes (Kings College) asked ‘Where are the workers?’ Josh Martin (Bank of England) described what we can expect from digital developments, Nicola Archer (Savanta) asked if public opinion was a barrier to AI (Automated Intelligence). And David Stroll (Opagio Ltd) and Mathew Nagel (Neatsmith Ltd) presented an excellent case study: ‘Solving the UK Growth and Productivity Problem: one firm at a time’. They actually ask their employees how they can pay them more. They have increased their drivers pay by 50% by incorporating them more into the manufacturing and installation process.
The afternoon of the Conference went on to wider economic issues and measurement, starting with a Keynote address by Professor Martin Weale (Kings Business School) looking at ‘Income Distribution and GDP’, in which he pointed out that in the past the National Accounts had been more concerned with net national income than GDP and had presented data on the distribution of income. His observation that GDP is a measure of economic activity rather than an indicator of economic progress provided the ideal introduction to the topic of the open forum ‘What is the future of GDP?’ chaired by Professor Paul Allin (Imperial College). Contributions to the debate as to whether GDP should be replaced or extended were provided by Ehsan Masood, (Author of ‘GDP the World’s most powerful formula and why it must change’), Richard Heys (ONS) and Jennifer Wallace (Carnegie Trust) with observations from the floor contributing to a lively session. Finally, Paul Allin called for a vote on a three-way option: a) to keep GDP as it is, changing only what is required to measure a changing economy; b) extending the measure in some way to include measures of well-being or satisfaction/happiness; or c) scrapping it and replacing it with something new. The voting was strongly in favour of choice b): that GDP should be extended. There were only two votes for a completely new measure, possibly out of sympathy for all those whose livelihoods are bound up with the measurement of GDP!
Session 4 ‘Where to for the National Accounts?’ examined some of the issues in more detail firstly considering the effects of climate change: ‘From people to plants – what should we value?’ by Sanjiv Mahajan (ONS). Sanjiv took us through what we know (in data terms) and showed that much of the progress we appear to be making with decarbonisation is not real – we are simply moving it around. Affluent society in the developed countries has to change and move away from growth. Technological advances alone will never achieve net-zero. And he challenged us with the questions: How do we get the right policies in place to make individuals change their behaviour to prevent catastrophe? What do we need to do to have the right data to support those policies?
Secondly the session looked at that key question: ‘How should we value the unproductive’: a very well-researched and presented paper by Vicky Pryce (CEBR). Vicky went through all the research on how difficult it is to measure public sector productivity and unpaid work. (My favourite fact: what is a housewife worth? £159,137 p.a. according to a Daily Telegraph calculation in 2014) and closed with a statement as to why measuring matters: because according to the ONS “Important qualitative and quantitative issues would otherwise be missed from any analysis of prosperity”. Measuring unpaid production and consumption helps assess better the activities that affect people’s well-being. Different impacts on well-being depending on whether time is spent on activities that people choose to do or have to do. It can help with issues in relation to stress levels across the population.
And the ONS argues “Measuring unpaid production also allows users to analyse the reciprocating relationship between unpaid work and the economic choices people make; the substitution between unpaid and paid activities is important for considering labour market and social policies together”. In other words: properly valuing so-called ‘unproductive’ work and perceived ‘less-productive’ work is essential for fairness and wider prosperity.
Finally, in the closing session, Sir John Curtice and Sir Vince Cable, jousted over the question ‘What is the role of Politics in Economics?’ Sir John defined politics as the art of communication between the rulers and the ruled, and cast himself as spokesperson for the ruled, and Sir Vince as representative ex-ruler. Sir John then very ably showed the trends in public feelings on current major issues facing our society and Sir Vince, after speculating that Sir John’s sub-theme was clearly: ‘Why are politicians so irrational? parried, also very ably, showing for each issue why politicians couldn’t, or weren’t able, to do anything about it at the time!
An example will give you the flavour: answers to the question ‘Government should redistribute income from the better-off to the less well-off’ (Source: British Social Attitudes) show good public support for redistribution – the level of support actually increasing in recent years. Also, recently (since 2019) there is less agreement to the question: ‘If welfare benefits weren’t so generous, people would learn to stand on their own two feet’ (source BSA). So why isn’t the government acting on this change in public attitudes? Sir Vince responded that, of course, people are very ambivalent about redistribution. And they think very differently about redistribution of income compared with wealth. Inheritance tax – which is arguably the most effective method of redistribution – is the most unpopular tax. Re-distribution via benefits is actually very controversial. Probably the thing should be being done is the reform of Council tax – but the losers in any reform plan tend to be more vocal than the winners. And so it continues. In other words, for politicians, it’s always more complicated than is indicated by simple charts.
Another example: concern about Climate Change has risen since 2015 (Source: Ipsos) – why isn’t this translating into political action? Sir Vince responded that, indeed, the recent increase in public concern was very striking, but so far it hadn’t transformed into itself into political preferences. Individuals have very different utility preferences and the inclusive carbon tax we are willing to pay is considerably less than what is needed to obtain significant reduction in carbon emissions. Take the current discussion on wind-farms – it seems astonishing that preserving the view should matter more than the potential savings – but so far it seems that the ‘banners’ of onshore wind-farms are winning.
They also covered taxes and spending, Brexit and Immigration: it was a very entertaining and educational exposition!
The Event closed with everyone more knowledgeable about issues with National Statistics , redefining GDP, measuring productivity, and how difficult life is for politicians. Several consoling glasses of wine or pints of beer were required to allow us further discussion to consolidate our new-found knowledge, and vow to carry on campaigning for better (more accurate and more appropriate) statistical measures to guide policy in the future.
All slides are available at The Growth Event – Better Statistics CIC (betterstats.net)
The Pet revolution
Following the article in last month’ issue, Cats in the Archive, Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange’s book The Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life has now been published.
It draws on the work undertaken by Professors Hamlett and Strange for the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Pets and Family Project. It used The Archive of Market and Social Research as one of its research sources.
The book tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets people keep, as well as how they relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The authors describe the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives. The capacity of pets to forge strong emotional attachments with their guardians was a major theme of the Pets and Family Life Project. While species popularity, pet keeping practices and cultural framing changed over time, there was significant long-term continuity in emotional investment in animals and the book shows that historical research strongly supports the contention that pets can make a significant contribution to individual well-being.
For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions – industrial, agricultural, political – to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life.
The book, engagingly illustrated and a delight not only for pet lovers but all those interested in social developments in this country, is published by Reaktion Books and is available from Amazon and all good book shops .
Welcome Marion
We welcome new volunteer Marion Chamberlain, who has joined the Contents Team as Operations Manager. The amount of material we are now receiving, particularly modern data in digitised form, means that the task of processing our collections is becoming increasingly complex. Marion, working closely with Christine Eborall, is developing a spreadsheet whereby contributions of material will be tracked from promises, through receipt, to scanning, cataloguing, and loading. We already have excellent procedures for hardcopy material; scanning of paper copy will continue as usual at Harrow, and we have plenty to do as we weren’t able to do very much during the pandemic. But because reports and papers are increasingly received in digital format, we must have a digitally appropriate process to enhance efficiency and avoid duplication, both of effort and material.
Digital material means no scanning, and cataloguing can be done at home. We are building up a team of in-home cataloguers and these will be overseen by Marion.
Marion Chamberlain has just retired from her position as Ipsos Interactive Services Global Programme Director (the Digital Research Arm of Ipsos). She was with Ipsos for six and a half years and prior to that, spent nearly 25 years with TNS and Kantar.
Her work with Ipsos was about introducing best practice in Programme Management and leading process change, ensuring that new systems met with the strategy of the company and were well implemented – a very good fit for the AMSR Contents Team!
Significant Insights
James Endersby, CEO of Insight Agency Opinium, talked to us about his Charity
What is Significant Insights and why did you start it?
Thanks for asking! Obviously, my real job is CEO of the insight agency Opinium, but I’ve always believed that we also need to use our businesses and our professional positions for good. In February 2020, in my spare time, I launched Significant Insights, which is a global content platform for the market research industry, and on a mission to make our sector more accessible by bringing our incredible people, their journeys, lessons, tips and inspiring stories to life.
Significant Insights wants to help younger researchers develop their careers and open up the industry to all backgrounds, and to those that might not consider it. In short, the platform simply exists to profile and give a voice to senior researchers, and younger researchers on their way up, and to provide a channel for them to impart their wisdom, so that new researchers, and those outside our industry can learn, grow, develop and find their ways to the top.
You’re doing this great job supporting our sector, but how can anyone reading this help Significant Insights?
What a great question! Well first they could head straight to www.significantinsightsmedia.com, enjoy the inspiring content, and please also follow us on LinkedIn!
There are so many incredible and experienced people in our industry with great advice and wisdom pretty much locked away. No one asks them! I try to ask as many of them as possible, but I’m only scratching the surface. If anyone reading this would like to share their career journey, or would like to recommend someone they admire, I’d happily conduct a profile interview and showcase them.
As you know my day job is managing Opinium and we’re pretty fast-growing, so the plan is to bring on sponsors and supporters who would like to align their businesses with Significant Insights, support the cause, be that through advertising on the home page, inside the various sections, or sponsoring our annual ‘Significant Insights Global 30 Under 30 Awards’ to recognise and support junior talent. The revenues will go towards hiring an editor who can help lead the site and help bring out more and more precious content so we can help an increasing number of talented people to thrive and inspire many more to join our sector!
Who’s given the most inspiring interview so far?
I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite, but Bob Qureshi has an inspiring career journey and has fantastic advice for junior researchers. Priscilla McKinney tells the story of how her business burnt down and she built it all back up and is still a terrific success, a force of supportive positivity, and inspires others to follow suite. Jan Gooding’s and Vanessa Oshima’s interviews are also ones to read! There must be so many wonderful stories out there. Do get in touch!
Memories of Jeremy
Paul Edwards writes
The fact that so much has been written about Jeremy since his death is testament to the enormous impact he has had in the world of marketing and advertising.
His career details are deceptively simple: Creative Director and Chairman at J Walter Thompson and following his ‘retirement’ (which was only last year) he became a sage in the WPP group. Shareholders will know him from his articles in the WPP annual report, Guardian readers will know him from his regular column and Campaign readers will recall his ‘agony uncle’ column. He also found time to be president of the MRS and was a welcome supporter of the AMSR.
He always spoke and wrote with wit and wisdom. His articles were gathered into readable and enlightening books. He was also a kind and generous colleague. Jeremy always took time with the recruitment and mentoring of the WPP graduates – many of them have taken to social media to share their memories and gratitude. Somehow, he made time for everyone.
His partnership with Stephen King at JWT made the agency a powerhouse of thinking and invention. Between them they managed to understand and communicate the way that advertising and brands work.
Everyone who knew him has a store of Jeremy anecdotes mostly showing how perceptive and funny he was. I remember sitting next to him at one of those black- tie dinners with an eminent after-dinner speaker. Afterwards I expressed to Jeremy my disappointment with the talk which should have been so interesting. Quick as a flash he just said “Of course, no metaphor.” As always, he was spot on.
Jeremy will be fondly remembered on a personal basis by everyone he met; his influential thinking will live on forever.
If you would like to read more by Jeremy, WPP have made a collection of his work available: https://www.wpp.com/the-bullmore-collection
I highly recommend it.
If you’re looking for older articles, we will be migrating our pre-2023 newsletters to the updated AMSR website during the course of the coming months. It may be that you can’t find what you’re looking for at the moment, but please check back regularly.