Growing Up in an Oil Town Survey (1986)

An additional data source appeared unexpectedly in 2017 when Isabel Seidel, the Sociology Departmental secretary, was contacted by David Oldman, a former sociologist in the Department. He was living in London and whilst moving house found a box of papers in his garage.

Following some detective work, we discovered that it was data from a 1980s study that had used the Aberdeen Child Development Survey to contact families connected to the oil industry. The 1986 survey was a follow-up of the ‘Family Survey’ from 1964.

The Aberdeen part of it had been given the unappealing name of “GUANO” - Growing Up in An Oil Town (it took us a long time to find out what that stood for) and was led by John (now Lord) Sewell. Aberdeen was also certainly not just a town. But very little was published beyond conference papers and most of these had disappeared.

The electronic files David had sent us were in an antiquated code and were unreadable. The box of papers contained the original questionnaires, plus some large sheets of printout from computerised files in fading ink. Was it any use?

Krzys Adamczyk spent the summer of 2018 organising and coding it into recognisable machine-readable data. This small sample of 389 respondents was recruited from the ‘Family Survey’ sub-sample (n = 2510) of the original 1962-64 study. It was in fact two surveys – one of 251 parental respondents, and another of 138 child respondents, each with a corresponding parent in the first survey – which asked questions pertaining to individuals’ work history, housing tenure, family relations and many other topics. Whilst this data remains largely unexplored, we do know that, by and large, parental respondents did not join the ‘oil-boom’. Their children, however, benefitted from the oil industry. 58% of men and 25% of women had worked in an ‘oil’ or ‘oil-related’ job at the time of the survey in 1986.

Claire Wallace and Krzys Adamczyk, Researchers