Using Family Histories to Understand the Intergenerational Transmission of Chronic Poverty

A method of collecting family histories that would act as a means of linking households from the panel studies with individual life histories is proposed. The procedure used to construct a three-generation ‘social genealogical’ chart of the family and a strategy for interviewing individual family members sited across the generations of the family is described. A mode of ‘contrastive comparison’ analysis between the factual family history and the accounts of the family given by differently-sited family members is explained that would allow a holistic extra-individual view of the family to be constructed. [CPRC Working Paper 103]