The Mass Observation project is a social scientific research organization established in 1937 with the aim of creating an ‘Anthropology of Ourselves’. The original studies comprised a national panel of volunteers who responded on a regular basis to questionnaires and directives. On the coronation of King George VI (12 May 1937) the first ‘day in the life of diaries’ were collected as a directive to volunteers. Diarists were then asked to repeat the diary format on every twelfth day of the month thereafter. Five hundred people recorded diaries, although because the sample was based on volunteers it was not nationally representative.
The diaries analysed here were collected on two days in 1937: Saturday, 12 June and Monday, 12 July. Fourteen female diarists were selected on the basis of the legibility of the diaries on both days. Detailed socio-demographic variables of diarists were not collected to the degree that is common practice in contemporary social scientific research, but a crude breakdown of background variables was amenable. As Table 3.1 indicates, the diaries analysed were written by women of different ages, most of whom were ‘housewives’, married with children and twothirds were middle class.
Given the format of the two datasets, it would be wrong to suggest they are comparable. At best, the two sets of data provide indications and tentative signs of changing temporal rhythms. Diarists were asked to record what they did and how they felt (their mood) on that particular day. This resulted in variations of the way the day was recorded. In some cases diarists recorded their day in the form of a time diary (e.g. 7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.10 a.m. made cup of tea); others wrote a paragraph outlining the rhythm of the day. By contrast, household interviews provided scope to explore temporalities of social practices in more detail. The interviews explored the length of time respondents allocated to particular practices (duration), the pace of the practice (tempo), whether the practice was performed simultaneously with other people or in conjunction with another practice (synchronization), how frequently the practice was performed (periodicity), and in what order (sequence). It was impossible to recover this detail of the temporalities of practices from the diaries.
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Dale Southerton