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Archive of publicly available audio clips and text excerpts from the larger collection Life Histories and Social Change. Life Histories and Social Change is a collection of qualitative life story interviews with three cohorts of Irish citizens, each of which reached adulthood in the crucial decades of the 1950s (an era of socio-economic decline), the 1970s (an era of initial 'modernisation') and in the 1990s (the 'Celtic Tiger' boom). The research was funded by the Irish Research Council and a total of 113 life history interviews were conducted by researchers from Maynooth University between 2006 and 2008.
This sub-collection of openly available data is particularly suitable for teaching, and is a rich resource of primary research data including first hand accounts of significant historical events and periods, and aspects of Irish society both past and present. This archive is also a useful resource for teaching qualitative social science research methods.
Examples of topics that can be explored using this data include:
• Periods of national struggle and change, and how they have affected the fortunes of families and individuals
• Gender roles, changing relationships between Irish women and men, and changing roles within the family
• The experience and impact of emigration on Irish communities
• Changing relationship between the Catholic Church, the Irish State and the individual
• Social inequalities in Irish communities and neighbourhoods
• How Irish women and men have courted, dated, married and separated
• Irish childhoods over the last 100 years, and the experience of growing up in Ireland
• Our relationship with cinema, television, radio and the Internet; how we've been entertained, informed and sometimes changed by the media
The full-length transcripts of the interviews from which these audio clips were derived are available through the Life Histories and Social Change collection (see Related Materials). While the 22 audio clips in this sub-folder are openly available to all users, access to all of the audio clips (135 clips in total) and the full-length transcripts is restricted to bona fide researchers and teachers, and to students who are currently registered at a third-level academic institution. See the 'Life History and Social Change' collection to request access to the full collection.