The Life Project by Helen Pearson

Author:Helen Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028104
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2016-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Opening Up

Cohorts Yield Their Treasures

To find the unlikely salvation of the second and third British birth cohorts, you must go down, once again, into a basement – this time at the University of Essex. You certainly won’t have an easy time of it.

The university, which is on the outskirts of Colchester, was born in 1964, during a great expansion of the higher education system and amidst optimism that scholarship could forge a new future for the country. It quickly achieved notoriety for student protests, and demonstrations there often made the national news. Another legacy from the 1960s is its architecture: brutal concrete structures that some might say lacked soul. The campus consists of grey tower blocks much like disappointed skyscrapers and a series of interconnected courtyards that do nothing so much as suck in cold winds and channel them through the desolate quads.

Once you have navigated your way through this grim landscape, you must cross a concrete walkway, enter one of the buildings, go down some steps and walk along a dark corridor, until you arrive at a steel door in a brick wall that has been reinforced with the type of wire used to strengthen prison walls. After navigating your way through the three lock systems, you emerge into a small vestibule that smells of new vinyl and is scrutinized carefully by security cameras. Here you can see thermometers carefully monitoring for any sign of overheating and tiny ceiling sensors that will set phones ringing across the campus at the first sniff of smoke. If you pass muster and get through the vestibule and the next door, you will arrive in the basement room, only to be hit by a wall of noise. The roar comes from the racks of sleek, black, computer servers that are lined up like rows of humming refrigerators and together can store some 40 terabytes of digital information – the equivalent of around 10.5 million King James bibles. These machines in Essex hold one of the the largest collections of social science data in the world, which is why they are so carefully protected by walls, locks and sensors. It is here – at the UK Data Archive – that most of the data on the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts is now stored and it is from here that scientists around the world can now access it.

Most people who want to use the cohort data have no need to visit the basement in person, of course. They can log on to the website of the archive, request permission and, if they receive it, simply search for the data that they need.a A user searching for SOCIAL CLASS, for example, would bring up the files of data on the 1958 perinatal mortality survey, as they would if they were searching for BLOOD, HOSPITALIZATION, HOUSEWORK, SMOKING or any one of another sixty terms. Almost any search will bring up Butler’s mammoth survey of the 1970-born children when they were sixteen, which is filed under

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