Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This study was generated as part of the project ‘Living standards, social identities and the English working class, 1945-1970’, which aimed to investigate how and why working-class living standards and identities changed between 1945 and 1970. One of its main objectives was to re-analyse those postwar social science datasets that have been influential in the writing of histories and social science studies of working class life.
Main Topics:

This dataset is an ACCESS database that comprises 405 digitised questionnaires from 2 studies of the Crown Street area of inner-city Liverpool. The first study, comprising 74 questionnaires, was undertaken in 1955-56, under the supervision of Charles Vereker and John Barron Mays. The second, comprising 331 questionnaires, was undertaken in 1963-64; little contextual information survives but this, like the first study, was initiaited by the University of Liverpool’s Sociology Department. Each questionnaire covered one household. The 1963 questionnaires include sections on budgeting and consumption that were filled in by each adult member in the household. This later study also included a small sub-sample of residents in Liverpool’s southern suburbs. Each questionnaire covered housing conditions, occupations, social activities and voting patterns. The fields within the database replicate those used in the original paper questionnaires. It is not possible to link the two studies together; there was little if any overlap in respondents and the questionnaires’ fields differ markedly. The tables relating to each study are distinguished by including the year of the study from which they are derived in their title.