Jacqueline Lesley Burgoyne (10 September 1944 – 10 January 1988) was a British sociologist and academic who specialised in family life.
[2][3] Burgoyne remained at Sheffield Polytechnic for the rest of her academic career, before dying of ovarian cancer on 10 January 1988.
[2] A major aspect of her research in the late 1970s and early 1980s focused on stepfamilies and the children of divorced parents who married again, which had largely been studied from a psychological or therapeutic (and thus individual-focused) perspective up to that time; instead, her lengthy interviews revealed that the impact of divorce and marital failure was both a private and a public experience related to effects on employment, finance and legal proceedings.
Interviewees frequently included accounts of these interactions in discussions about their marital history and the development of step-families; often, divorced parents who remarried found their situation frustrated by continuities from their previous marriage relating to issues such as child custody or maintenance, and complications when trying to establish a new family.
[3] As David Clark, who collaborated with Burgoyne on the project, later recalled: "It was these issues which constituted the main agenda for [her] intellectual interests and which constantly brought her back to key themes: public/private, structure/process, outer/inner, biography/history".