Social Statistics: Databases

Mass Observation Project: Series II & III (1990s/2000s) now available

Our Mass Observation Project online archive has been extended providing further material covering the 1990s and 2000s.

The Mass Observation archive is a pioneering project documenting the social history of Britain. It gathers valuable primary source materials, including survey responses, diaries, letters, lists, maps and photographs, offering a comprehensive insight into the everyday lives, experiences and opinions of ordinary people. These rich records, generated in response to a series of questionnaires (‘directives’), cover diverse themes such as current events, friends and family, the home, leisure, politics, society, culture, work, finance and the economy and new technology.

Material in Mass Observation Project, (1981-2009), addresses, in depth, a range of topics including attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, Britain's relations with Europe, UK elections, and pivotal events such as the Falklands War, fall of the Berlin Wall, the Miners’ Strike, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9/11.

The collection stands as an invaluable resource for studying social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it holds significant value for the University's interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities, such as the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, the Cathie Marsh Institute (CMI) and the Centre On the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE).

Use alongside our Mass Observation Online archive (1937-1967), providing primary material from the original Mass Observation study, for access to some of the most comprehensive sources for qualitative social data in the UK.

Archives of Sexuality and Gender

This database, currently the largest portfolio of digital primary source material to address this complex area of cultural studies, encompasses social history, social and political science, psychology, health, and policy studies.

The Library offers access to three diversely sourced collections. The broad expanse of LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 and sex and sexuality from the sixteenth century to the twentieth allow scholars to trace how sexual norms have changed over time, the evolution of public health, changing gender roles, and the ebb and flow of social movements and activism. Researchers can also draw upon a wider pool of material to uncover hidden histories, such as the full text of the landmark Wolfenden report (1957), and the testimonies that underpinned its findings.

The newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas. This collection also widens our offer to interdisciplinary groupings such as the Morgan Centre, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the University’s pioneering MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. 

These collections have been selected to complement our growing reserves in the area – both digital (Gender: identity and social change and Defining Gender) and physical (LGBQT+ holdings in our Special Collections) - with the latter recently boosted by the acquisition of the archive which will feature prominently in the forthcoming ‘Secret Public’ exhibition at the Rylands.

The database incorporates multiple filtering options, including a term frequency tool, which enables mapping of the usage of a word or phrase by content type or popularity over a period of years. Researchers can also cross-search the entirety of the Library’s content hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

UK Data Service

The UK Data Service is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to meet the data needs of researchers, students and teachers from all sectors, including academia, central and local government, charities and foundations, independent research centres, think tanks, and business consultants and the commercial sector. The UK Data Service collection includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data. Data users can browse UK Data Service collections online and register with UKDS to analyse and download them. Open Data collections are available for anyone to use; registration is only required if you wish to download, order, or analyse online, data that are classified as Safeguarded or Controlled.

The UKDS.Stat platform enables you to extract the information you want from large socio-economic international datasets available at the UK Data Service. The World Bank, IMF and OECD datasets are open to all, and do not require login to access. Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations are restricted to users from UK higher or further education institutions. Users from this community will be prompted to register and login when accessing these data. Logging in allows users to save and share queries.

Gender: Identity & Social Change

As a result of consultation with academics from the Faculty of Humanities and colleagues at the Rylands, the Library has arranged for electronic access to the Gender: Identity and Social Change database. Hosted by AM, the collection serves as a valuable reserve of digitised primary materialsdocumenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations, and in particular the struggle for women’s rights, from the nineteenth century to the present. Sourced from institutions from across the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK - including, as a guarantor of worth, the Rylands - contents are grouped under 13 key themes: Women’s Suffrage; Feminism; The Men’s Movement; Education and Training; Employment and Labour; The Body; Conduct and Politeness; Domesticity and the Family; Government and Politics; Legislation and Legal Cases; Leisure and Entertainment: Organisations, Associations and Societies; Sex and Sexuality.

As such the material not only aligns with academic activity undertaken within traditional disciplines such as sociology and history, but also ongoing interdisciplinary research undertaken by research hubs clustered around the social sciences (such as the Morgan Centre and Movements@Manchester) and within SALC, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the long-running MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. The collection also contributes further to the library’s extensive reserves in a fertile area of study – complementing both other large-scale digital archival collections (most notably, the Archives of Sexuality and Gender and Defining Gender, 1450-1910) and the deep repository of physical materials offered at the Rylands, which are of course considerably more extensive than the selection digitised for inclusion in the database.

A variety of secondary features further facilitate study and offer a useful starting point for first-time researchers. These include scholarly essays, highlighted biographies, featured organisations, video interviews and an interactive chronology to provide context to support printed resources and the wealth of visual material offered.

SAGE Research Methods Foundations

In response to academic requests and in-house analysis of demand, the library has added SAGE Research Methods Foundations to its holdings. Forming part of the popular Sage Research Methods database collection - which also includes Books and Reference; Video and Cases (Pt. 1) - this integrated collection offers an invaluable introductory overview for first-time researchers of the major methods topics. In addition to comprehensive coverage of themes and approaches, including their history, development and current critical debates around them, there are also biographical entries for both notable researchers and previously neglected pioneers together with pointers for further reading. Incorporating contributions from the University’s own researchers, the Foundations collection is an excellent starting point for both new PGs embarking on methods courses and those seeking to refresh and revaluate their perspective on an ever-evolving field of practice. To further facilitate discovery all entries in the Foundations collection are also individually indexed on Library Search.

Object Lessons Archive 2015-2018

As a result of conversations with academic colleagues across the humanities, the Library has purchased a collection of monographs published as an archival collection from Bloomsbury. The ‘Object Lessons’ series emerged out of The Atlantic Monthly’s heralded short essays and looks in depth at ‘the hidden lives of ordinary things’ from a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches. Averaging at c.25,000 words, each text focuses on a single topic to offer a fresh and often surprising focus on the materials of the everyday and question the quotidian in a manner that complements the fundamental critical practice of taking nothing for granted.

In addition to being of general interest to anyone involved in cultural studies, and intra-disciplinary research groupings as diverse as the Morgan Centre, the Sustainable Consumption Institute and The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective, the archive offers a virtual complement to the object-focused scholarship and collection-centred teaching activities undertaken at the Rylands. As usual in addition to the provision of a general link to the collection, all titles owned in the series are also individually indexed on Library search.

Mass Observation Project: Series II & III (1990s/2000s) now available

Our Mass Observation Project online archive has been extended providing further material covering the 1990s and 2000s.

The Mass Observation archive is a pioneering project documenting the social history of Britain. It gathers valuable primary source materials, including survey responses, diaries, letters, lists, maps and photographs, offering a comprehensive insight into the everyday lives, experiences and opinions of ordinary people. These rich records, generated in response to a series of questionnaires (‘directives’), cover diverse themes such as current events, friends and family, the home, leisure, politics, society, culture, work, finance and the economy and new technology.

Material in Mass Observation Project, (1981-2009), addresses, in depth, a range of topics including attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, Britain's relations with Europe, UK elections, and pivotal events such as the Falklands War, fall of the Berlin Wall, the Miners’ Strike, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9/11.

The collection stands as an invaluable resource for studying social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it holds significant value for the University's interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities, such as the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, the Cathie Marsh Institute (CMI) and the Centre On the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE).

Use alongside our Mass Observation Online archive (1937-1967), providing primary material from the original Mass Observation study, for access to some of the most comprehensive sources for qualitative social data in the UK.