The Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) is Britain’s longest-running birth cohort study. From their birth in 1946 until the present day, its research participants, or study members, have filled out questionnaires and completed cognitive or physical examinations every few years. Among other outcomes, the findings of these studies have framed how we understand health inequalities. Throughout the decades and multiple follow-up studies, each year the study members have received a birthday card from the survey staff. Although the birthday cards were originally produced in 1962 as a method to record changes of address at a time when the adolescent study members were potentially leaving school and home, they have become more than that with time. The cards mark, and have helped create, an ongoing evolving relationship between the NSHD and the surveyed study members, eventually coming to represent a relationship between the study members themselves. This article uses the birthday cards alongside archival material from the NSHD and oral history interviews with survey staff to trace the history of the growing awareness of importance of emotion within British social science research communities over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It documents changing attitudes to science’s dependence on research participants, their well-being, and the collaborative nature of scientific research. The article deploys an intertextual approach to reading these texts alongside an attention to emotional communities drawing on the work of Barbara Rosenwein.

医学研究委员会国家健康与发展调查 (NSHD) 是英国运行时间最长的出生队列研究。从 1946 年出生至今，其研究参与者或研究成员每隔几年就会填写问卷并完成认知或身体检查。除其他结果外，这些研究的结果构建了我们如何理解健康不平等。在数十年的多次后续研究中，每年研究成员都会收到调查人员寄来的生日贺卡。尽管生日贺卡最初是在 1962 年制作的，目的是在青少年研究成员可能离开学校和家庭时记录地址的变化，但随着时间的推移，它们的用途已经变得不止于此。这些卡片标志着并帮助建立了 NSHD 和接受调查的研究成员之间不断发展的关系，最终代表了研究成员之间的关系。本文使用生日贺卡、NSHD 的档案材料以及对调查人员的口述历史采访，追溯了 20 世纪和 21 世纪初期英国社会科学研究界对情感重要性日益认识的历史。它记录了人们对科学对研究参与者的依赖、他们的福祉以及科学研究的协作性质的态度的变化。本文采用互文方法来阅读这些文本，同时借鉴芭芭拉·罗森温 (Barbara Rosenwein) 的作品对情感群体的关注。