Current projects

The BADEN network funded by The Leverhulme Trust gathers researchers from academia and national statistical offices and gives a strong impetus to theory development and practical implementation of adaptive survey designs.

Adaptive survey designs differentiate features for different population subgroups based on auxiliary data about the sample obtained from frame data, registry data or paradata.

The development of a Bayesian framework will allow the learning and constant updating of key input parameters to these designs.

More specifically, our objectives are:

• To bring together researchers on a periodic basis and to speed up theoretical development and practical implementations of adaptive survey designs
• To establish a cross-institute research agenda for the main research aim
• To design and implement joint simulation studies
• To support discussion on theory and the exchange of empirical results
• To disseminate work to a larger public in order to advocate ideas and to get feedback on feasibility and utility
• To lay the groundwork for joint papers and other forms of collaboration
• To assist implementation of adaptive survey designs

People

• Prof Natalie Shlomo - Principal Investigator (PI)
• Dr Stephanie Coffey - US Census Bureau
• Dr Gabriele Durrant - University of Southampton
• Dr Peter Lundquist - Statistics Sweden
• Mr Daniel Pratt - RTI International, North Carolina
• Dr Barry Schouten - Statistics Netherlands
• Dr James Wagner - University of Michigan
• Ms Rebecca Moore - Network Facilitator

CoDE is a four year interdisciplinary programme of research concerned with understanding changing ethnic inequalities and identities.

Our team has over 20 academics, a number of affiliate members and PhD students working from Glasgow, Oxford and Manchester. We also have a number of valued partners.

CoDE utilises a variety of research techniques and tools to ensure that the potential economic and social benefits of our research are realised. Our focus is on the changes within ethnic groups (their internal structures and formulations of identities) and their external relationships and position in British society.

Bringing together sociologists, demographers, historians, geographers, and political scientists, we are researching:

• how class, gender, generation, age and place produce different experiences and visions of ethnicity across the UK;
• how changes in ethnic identities over time were expressed through the emergence of new or mixed identities, as well as the shifting significance of language and religion as a marker of ethnicity;
• the significance of the context of emigration and arrival in shaping ethnic identities and the long-term trajectories of migrants in British society;
• how major social changes in Britain’s economic and political structures have impacted on the ethnic inequalities experienced in employment and politics today.

Objectives and research

• Advance methods and understanding of sub-national socio-demographic analysis in Latin America.
• Strengthen research networks within Latin America and with the United Kingdom to transfer knowledge to government bodies responsible for development of public policy.
• Construct and analyse a database of sub-national demographic trends.
• Demonstrate with examples the utility of sub-national demographic projection in sub-national planning.

Using a longitudinal outlook, the project investigates the outcomes and trajectories of ethnic minority inclusion within schools; the labour market; and civic and political life in Britain and Canada, as well as the role that 'family capital' plays in determining these inclusion patterns.

Social cohesion is perceived as an important social goal within academic and policy circles. A crucial precondition to this goal is social inclusion, i.e. ensuring that individuals become full members of society by accessing societal resources and institutions.

In recent decades, fast-growing ethnic diversity has led to intensifying policy and academic debates on how this is affecting processes of social inclusion and cohesion. Examining the factors influencing ethnic inclusion has thus increased in importance.

The project contributes to this debate by exploring the dynamics of ethnic inclusion into the economic and civic-political spheres and the interplay of these two separate but closely connected spheres. It also investigates how these lifelong processes are shaped by family capital, i.e. a broad and complex range of cultural, social, economic and political influences that are created within the family context.

More specifically, the research addresses four core questions:

1. What are the pathways to socio-economic and civic-political inclusion of ethnic minorities into British and Canadian institutions?
2. What role does family capital (financial, human, social and cultural) play?
3. What are the best ways to address the differentials in family influences?
4. Do different policy environments generate different types of outcomes?

In order to answer these questions, the study draws on available secondary data sources (including Understanding Society and the Millennium Cohort Study in Britain and the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics in Canada) and uses advanced longitudinal and multilevel methods of data analysis.

Q-Step is a £19.5 million programme designed to promote a step-change in quantitative social science training.

Over a five-year period from 2013, fifteen universities across the UK are delivering specialist undergraduate programmes, including new courses, work placements and pathways to postgraduate study. Expertise and resources will be shared across the higher education sector through an accompanying support programme, which will also forge links with schools and employers.

Q-Step was developed as a strategic response to the shortage of quantitatively-skilled social science graduates. It is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

Project videos

• About The University of Manchester's Q-Step programme
• ESRC Chief Executive, Paul Boyle talks about the Q-Step programme

The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) was set up at the University of Southampton in 2004.

NCRM is tasked with:

1. Increasing the quality and range of methodological approaches used by UK social scientists through a programme of training and capacity building, and
2. Driving forward methodological development and innovation through its own research programme.

In 2014, NCRM was recommissioned and Southampton formed a consortium with two further institutions with international reputations in methodological research and training in the social sciences: the universities of Manchester and Edinburgh.

Manchester University has longstanding experience in delivering high quality methodological research and training through the Cathie Marsh Institute, the Methods@Manchester initiative, has hosted two NCRM nodes and the Research Methods Programme.

Our contribution to NCRM is to run advanced short courses and the bursary scheme, and to provide leadership for the autumn school programme and the programme of international visits. We also have two three year research projects funded with the centre – one on survey methods and biosocial data and the other on disclosure risk.

Missing data due to non-response impose a serious threat to the quality of surveys and register-based statistics. Non-response is often not a random phenomenon. It usually depends on demographic and socio-economic characteristics of individuals or enterprises. Also the data collection process may have a substantial influence.

The response rate is often used as an indicator for survey quality. It has the advantage that is can be easily computed. However, low response rates will not necessarily cause estimates to be biased. There are ample examples in the literature where increased data collection efforts has lead to a higher response rate but also to a larger non-response bias.

To assess the effects of non-response on the quality of statistics, other quality indicators are needed. These indicators should measure the degree to which respondents and non-respondents differ from each other. In other words, such indicators should measure the degree to which the group of respondents in a survey or register resembles the population. The indicators are called Representativity Indicators or, for short, R-indicators.

It is the objective of the RISQ Project to develop R-indicators, to explore their characteristics and to show how to implement and use them in a practical data collection environment.

The project will demonstrate that R-indicators are not only very useful in the analysis of survey data, but also during fieldwork. They can be used to the monitor data collection processes, and therefore facilitate efficient allocation of interviewing resources.

The 7th Programme Framework

The RISQ Project is financed by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union. It is supported by the "Cooperation Programme". This programme has ten distinct themes. RISQ is part of the theme "Socio-economic sciences and the Humanities", and within this theme of Activity 8.6 ("Socio-economic and scientific indicators"), 8.6.3 ("Provision for underlying official statistics").

Immigration is a major political issue, with increasing media coverage, rising anti-immigration sentiment and the rise of anti-immigration political parties. The issue of migration sits centrally within the wider debate about ethnic and religious diversity and its effects on social cohesion.

We are still, though, a long way from understanding these issues and their potential consequences. They seem to rest on beliefs about national identity and ethnicity, but cannot be divorced from the effects of social class, education, economic competition and inequality, as well as the influences of geographical and social segregation, social structures and institutions.

This project will integrate two very different disciplines, social science and complexity science, in order to gain new understanding of these complex, social issues. It will do this by building a series of computer simulation models of these social processes.

One could think of these as serious versions of the Sims computer games, programmes that track the social interactions between many individuals. Such simulations allow ‘what if’ experiments to be performed so that a deeper understanding of the possible outcomes for the society as a whole can be established based on the interactions of many individuals.

The British Election Study (BES) is one of the longest-running election studies worldwide and the longest-running social science survey in the UK.

It has made a major contribution to the understanding of political attitudes and behaviour over nearly sixty years. Surveys have taken place immediately after every general election since 1964.

The first study conducted by David Butler and Donald Stokes in 1964, transformed the study of electoral behaviour in the UK. Since then the BES has provided data to help researchers understand changing patterns of party support and election outcomes.

The 2015 Study is themed Voters in Context and is designed to help our understanding of long-term political change, and the role of national and sub-national variations in the political and social context in shaping citizens’ attitudes and behaviour.