Interview with an Expat

Interview with an expat

The blogger ‘tropical expat’ has done an interview with an expat and pasted the interview on his blog. You can read the interview here: tropicalexpat

He is planning on doing some more, so I shall be keeping a lookout for them. It’s an interesting phenomenon – the researched doing their own research, and publishing it. There is no reason why they shouldn’t, of course, but it has caused me to reflect on my own ongoing work, my own interview material, and what I am doing with it all. I love to hear expat (or lifestyle migrant) stories but we can’t publish our own in this way as they tend to be intimate, in-depth, and usually confidential. Also, when we interviewed people we did it for university research purposes, not for blogging. However, we will be looking at our interview material as a whole over the coming weeks and looking for common themes and those special insights that come from qualitative research. We will use quotes from the interviews, but will usually either anonymise them or make sure the interviewee has agreed to be quoted. Nevertheless, some interesting challenges arise from the very public nature of so much of what we we do these days. Should I ever have started blogging? The lifestyle migration in Asia project blog can be seen here.

The Up Television Series

I am showing my students the Up films as part of my module Sociological Practice. In 1964, Granada Television interviewed, and spent some time with, a group of 7 year olds from diverse class backgrounds about their aspirations, attitudes to love and marriage, what sort of schooling they were getting, and other things that were meant to draw attention to their class position and how that was expected to be related to their future lives. The programme starts and ends with the Jesuit maxim ‘give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’.

Since then these ‘children’, who are the same age as me, have been interviewed again every seven years and a new programme has been produced each time. Granada Television and the producer Michael Apted have stuck with the group and the idea and have produced an ethnographic, longitidunal study of social class in Britain. It is a marvellous series. It illustrates the class structure of the 1960s and how it changed shape over the decades (and how it has persisted). It demonstrates the interaction of individual agency with social structure in the context of daily lives and wider historical change.