Doing Qualitative Secondary Analysis: Revisiting Young People’s Imagined Futures in Ray Pahl’s Sheppey Studies

This chapter offers an account of how the authors went about doing qualitative secondary analysis as part of the Living and Working on Sheppey project. The project involved working with material originally collected by Ray Pahl as part of his exploratory research for what became a modern sociological classic, Divisions of Labour (1984). The data we present here is a collection of essays written by school leavers in 1978 imagining their futures as if they were already past. We discuss how we undertook both content and narrative analysis of the essays and we draw on archived notes of Pahl’s preliminary analysis and our own interviews with Pahl about his research process. We further consider how we used the essays as a dataset in its own right, as a basis for replicating the essay-writing exercise in 2010 for comparative analysis, and as a platform for developing and designing a subsequent research project, Imagine Sheppey. In so doing, we critically consider our own practice and offer a practical guide for readers interested in working with existing qualitative data either to generate new analyses and insights or for comparative work.