eighteen - A passion for empirical sociology

Summary

Like many women academics before me, I regularly cross discipline boundaries, but I am primarily a sociologist. Faced with the question ‘What kind of sociology do I do?’ The answer is interdisciplinary, action research. That is what excites me.

How long have I thought of myself as a sociologist? It has probably been since I became a full-time postgraduate student on the MA in sociology at Essex University in 1974. In fact my interest in sociology goes much further back. It began with an irritation at the ‘university speak’ my sociologist boyfriend engaged in with his mates at informal get-togethers in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Denied a similar route into higher education by my failure to thrive at a catholic convent school in Berkshire, I left school aged 16, searching the local paper for jobs. Dental nursing attracted me, proving to be a good choice in terms of both geographical mobility and the field work context for my first piece of empirical research. I moved to London amid the excitement of the 1960s joining a temping agency and working my way around dental practices in the city for two years. By the age of 20 I realised that my salvation lay in higher education, but without A-levels I was fortunate to scrape a place on a teacher training course. The enlightened curriculum gave students the opportunity to choose a main subject and sociology was on offer. Specialising in sociology as a primary teacher was unusual; excited by the prospect of doing my own piece of mini research, I embarked upon a qualitative study of dental nurses’ experiences of work. Working for two-week periods at different dental practices I recruited my sample, and recorded my participant observation notes on a notepad in the ladies’ lavatory. Research ethics aside, my work mates assumed I had a weak bladder. It was a defining moment and I still have the handwritten record of a wildly over ambitious project which persuaded me that dental nursing was a boring, dead end job.

Three years of primary school teaching followed in East London. However, the confines of a staffroom populated by married women teachers who shopped for dinner in their lunch break, and a head near retirement who was unimpressed by child-centred education and sociology, dampened my interest in teaching. I yearned for the excitement of ideas.