The Observers and the Observed: The ‘dual Vision’ of the Mass Observation Project

In Summer 2008 I commissioned a Part 1 Directive on ‘Doing Family History Research’ from the Mass Observation Project as part of a Leverhulme-funded project [1] on the status and significance of genealogy and its role and consequences in personal and family lives. Drawing on examples from this research project, this article will consider how we can understand Mass Observation correspondents as generating sociological knowledge and insight through what I will call ‘dual vision’. Correspondents write about personal, interior and family lives by being both the observers and the observed, simultaneously commenting upon personal and family life as a social phenomenon (detailing the ‘typical case’), and able to document their own personal and family lives in detail. Further, given the function of the MOP to record for posterity, Mass Observers also consciously situate themselves and their accounts not just in social or geographical space, but also in relation to history, and in time. I will argue that MOP accounts of personal, interior and family lives are useful to sociologists both because this ‘dual vision’ makes possible rich and reflexive descriptions of personal and family life, but possibly more importantly, because it allows us to see how people consciously imagine and embed themselves in their social, geographical and temporal context through relating their own experiences to the ‘typical case’.