Teaching Tips: Up Film Series Paper Assignment
Rebecca Shiner
I fell in love with the study of personality development my first year of college, when I serendipitously dragged a friend with me to watch a documentary film called 28 Up from the Up film series. The Up series has tracked a group of 14 British people from the age of seven every seven years, following their development from childhood through messy adolescence into early, middle, and now later adulthood. The most recent installment, 63 Up, was released in late 2019. As an 18-year-old, I sat there riveted while I watched the lives of these 28-year-olds unfold before my very eyes. Some of participants showed remarkable continuity over time, and some of them exhibited interesting patterns of change. And one of them—Neal, the one I found most charming at age 7—left me feeling disoriented as I watched him succumb to a mysterious mental illness that rendered him wandering and homeless at age 28.
Because this films series has meant so much to me, I have particularly enjoyed using it as a way to help my students think about personality and its development over time. When Brent Donnellan and I taught a two week graduate course on personality development at the Summer Institute in Social and Personality Psychology in 2015, we started the course by showing 35 Up and ended it by showing 54 Up to ground all of our discussions in consideration of real lives. I have also used the films as the basis for an essay assignment in my undergraduate course on personality. I leave this paper assignment intentionally broad because I use it near the end of the course as an opportunity for students to reflect on earlier material in a more in-depth way. If you can only use one of the films for an assignment, I recommend using 35 Up or 42 Up, rather than one of the later films, because the later films have almost too much to cover for students to get a full sense of who the participants are. I make sure that students have access to all of the films, though, so that they can go back and re-watch segments of the required film for the paper, as well as longer segments from earlier and later films in the series if they think those will be helpful in developing their argument. Here is the undergraduate assignment:
"The Up film series consists of nine documentary films that have traced the lives of 14 British people from the age of seven every seven years into adulthood. The film critic Roger Ebert included 28 Up in his list of the top 10 films of all time and described the film series as 'an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium'. For this assignment, you will be watching 35 Up. You will be writing a paper in which you will develop your own thesis about some aspect of personality based on a thoughtful analysis of the participants in this film using material from this course. You may present your thesis by analyzing a single individual from the film, a subset of participants, or the participants as a whole. It is also your choice about which personality course material you use to develop your thesis. You may address issues that we have not discussed extensively in this course (e.g., the influence of socioeconomic status, the impact of relationships on personality), as long as you also use course material in the development of your argument. Spend as little space as you can summarizing the theories and research we have covered; only include as much as you need to in order to make your points clear. If you choose to do a case study (meaning an in-depth analysis of one, two, or several people), use the case study to make some general points about personality. What are lessons we can learn about personality from this particular person or people? Your case study will have more depth if you present interesting inconsistencies in the person's personality or consider how the person's configuration or combination of personality characteristics affects the person. At the end of the paper, after you have developed your thesis thoroughly, offer some ideas for future research exploring the claims that you have made in the paper. In brief, how could we go about testing the ideas you have presented in this paper? The paper should be approximately five pages long (double spaced, Times New Roman 12 font, 1-inch margins).
The 7 Up Series presents us with a stunning opportunity to watch decades of life unfold before our very eyes, and I hope that the film gets you thinking deeply about human nature, personality differences, and the beauty of human lives.”