Study title

As part of a project exploring the impact of Thatcherite social and economic policies on the lives of British people, we have merged together key variables from the British Cohort Study so that longitudinal data analyses over several years and decades are more easily available. The variables included relate to housing, schooling, employment, offending and victimisation, welfare, social and political attitudes and similar variables. This exercise was repeated for the National Child Development Study so as to provide a point of comparison. The data are not being made available here, but we have provided a narrative count of how we merged these two longitudinal data sets so that each data set had a longitudinal version of some of the data from birth to the year 2012.This grant follows on from two earlier ESRC-funded grants held by Stephen Farrall, and a British Academy seminar he co-organised with Colin Hay (a leading theorist of Thatcherism). The first grant was a scoping project, which assessed the extent to which it was possible to undertake more prolonged and in-depth investigations into the social, economic and cultural impacts of Thatcherite public policy on contemporary UK society, especially as these features relate to criminal justice policy. This earlier grant concluded that it was possible to undertake two further projects. The first of these (looking at regional level changes using repeated cross-sectional surveys) we have, with ESRC-funding, completed. The second project (and the one we are seeking funding for herein) would extend this enquiry to the individual level using longitudinal data (thereby ensuring that we do not fall foul of committing the ecological fallacy - that is assuming that because something operates at the national level, it also works in the same way for individuals). To do this we will use data from the British Cohort Study which is a longitudinal study of a group of men and women born in one week in 1970. The cohort (which...