Our project aims to collect and catalogue an archive of data on the role of celebrity in young people’s aspirations. The archive will include data from group and individual interviews, online discussion data and celebrity case studies. Data archiving is prioritised by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council raises a number of ethical and practical questions. Archiving enables the sharing of anonymised data with other researchers, creating the possibility of comparative studies and additional analysis of the data. From an ethical perspective, enabling other researchers to analyse existing data sets makes good use of the time and energy that research participants put in to taking part in research projects, encourages rich interpretations of our data and transparency of data analysis.

Photo: Frédérick Durand

In this post I discuss some of our dilemmas in designing youth-centred research about celebrity using offline and online methods.

The project team will start fieldwork in schools this month. In our first stage of data collection we will explore how young people collectively talk about celebrities and celebrity culture. We are interested in how our participants find out about celebrities, how they make sense of the stories they hear about them and how they relate these to their own lives.

The blog has been fairly quiet over the last couple of weeks because we’ve been focused on finding six schools in which to carry out interviews with young people. With schools busier than ever and having more and more demands on them, fewer and fewer feel able to support research activity. So, in the hope of making this process a bit less painful for others (and for ourselves in the future), we’ve  compiled ourtop ten tips for negotiating access to schools below.