The Archive of Market and Social Research summer party

The AMSR held its annual summer evening drinks party on 13th June at the same attractive venue as last year, the top floor and roof terrace of Bush House. The venue was donated by the Policy Institute and OvationMR sponsored the event. There was a real buzz among the 80 members of the great and good in market research and insights who attended.

Professor Jane Hamlett, a modern historian at Royal Holloway, talked about the growth of pets in British families since Victorian times. In her book Pet Revolution, she used information from the Archive – a Readers Digest report from the 1960’s and a qualitative segmentation of cat owners from CRAM in the 1970’s – to chart the evolution of pet ownership from the early 1800’s to the present day.

Professor, Sir John Curtice, speaking via video, talked about the importance of context when considering what the results of a survey mean. He used changing attitudes to the Royal Family as an example. The earliest survey he had been able to find, dating from 1969 was in the Archive. He also discussed his chapter about referendums in the AMSR’s latest book; Researching the public: post-war policy, politics and polling.

Phyllis Macfarlane talked about how A level history students in schools are being introduced to archives by AMSR. Students find the Archive useful because it is available online and comes with a helpful guide on how to use the Archive to answer exam topics for their dissertations.

Adam Phillips summed up the event and made a plea for volunteers to help with the work of AMSR. He asked researchers to consider contributing research reports, either on paper or in digital formats, that they think worth preserving, and for donations. AMSR needs to invest in specialist software to record who is using the Archive and for a part-time archivist who will need to be paid.

For a detailed report of the event see the AMRS Newsletter