Study title

Material from the open access Mass Observation Archive (MOA) provided the views of the public for this study. We added to this data source by: (i) commissioning a directive in Spring 2018, Directive 111 Charity and the Welfare State; (ii) digitising all responses, and transcribing all handwritten responses, to the directive; (iii)transcribing portions of responses to 3 key directives sent out in 1947, which are part of Topic Collection 53; and (iv) importing these data into Nvivo (a computer assisted qualitative data analysis program (CAQDAS)) where they were analysed. As discussed in our proposal the MOA expects the project to archive all MOA related data (the Nvivo project will be in read-only form) with the MOA at The Keep, in Brighton, rather than the UK Data Archive, and this we have done. To obtain access to these digital copies please either visit The Keep, Brighton or contact the MOA via email. Access to these is at the discretion of the MOA, and on condition of signing a user's agreement (email: moa@sussex.ac.uk)Discourses of Voluntary Action was a three-year research project (July 2017 – November 2020) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Discourses of Voluntary Action at two 'Transformational Moments' of the Welfare State, the 1940s and 2010s (ES/N018249/1)) and carried out by researchers at the universities of: Northumbria, Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam, Southampton and UCL. The publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942, and the subsequent establishment of comprehensive welfare services in the UK, has been referred to as ‘a revolutionary moment’. The same term was used to describe the context in which welfare services were dismantled in England in the 2010s. At these two transformational moments, fundamental questions were raised about the respective roles and responsibilities of the state and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in the provision of welfare services. During the first revolutionary moment, in the 1940s, the...