Working With Archived Classic Family and Community Studies: Illuminating Past and Present Conventions Around Acceptable Research Practice

This article addresses the ways that working with archived classic family and communities studies from the 1960s can throw a different light on past and present research conventions around acceptable research practice. We consider the constitution of ‘good’ methodological conduct through looking at the nature of data and acknowledgement of who generates it, culminating in a focus on the implications of acceptable and unacceptable researcher accounts. Past conventions raise questions about the merging of primary data and context alongside who is active in the research field, while present understandings of ‘good’ ethical practice become a suspect narrative.