10259 research outputs found
Sort by
Promoting Family/Friend Involvement in Care Planning in Care Homes: A Qualitative Exploration of the Usefulness and Relevance of an Information Resource, 2024
No full textThis study explored the views of family and friends of an older adult residing in a care home in England on a newly developed information resource on care planning. The development of the information resource was informed by previous research and sought to promote the involvement of family and friends in care planning. Remote focus group discussions were held in November 2024. The topic guide asked questions about family and friends’ views on the information resource and how, if appropriate, it could be improved. Audio recordings were transcribed verbatim. The views of 28 family and friends were obtained across four focus groups. Findings depict mixed experiences in family and friends’ involvement in care planning. Overall, and subject to some changes, the information resource was perceived as valuable by most family and friends
The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses: Experimental Data, 2011-2012
No full textThis is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure) on children's and adults' production of adverbial when-clauses.
Method: In a sentence repetition task, 16 three-year-old and 16 five-year-old children as well as 17 adults listened to and watched an animated story and then were asked to repeat what they had just heard and seen. Each story contained an adverbial when-clause and its main clause. The sentences were manipulated for their clause order, information structure, and clause length.
Adults tended to change main–when clause orders to when–main in their repetitions, and they showed a strong preference for the given–new order of information. In contrast, 3-year-olds tended to change when–main clause orders to main–when, and they showed a preference for the new–given order of information. In addition, 3-year-olds tended to produce short–long clause orders irrespective of what they had heard, whereas adults produced both short–long and long–short orders in line with the input. In general, 5-year-olds were more adultlike in their production compared to 3-year-olds.
Young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors in their production of complex sentences. They tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, they have not yet attained an adultlike sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors.LuCiD's mission is to transform our understanding of how children learn to talk, and deliver the scientific evidence needed to design effective interventions in early years education and healthcare.
Learning to use language to communicate effectively is hugely important for society. Many children enter school without the language skills they need to succeed in the classroom, and these early weaknesses in language and communication are a major predictor of educational and social inequality in later life. To tackle this problem, we need to know the answers to a number of questions: How do children learn language from what they see and hear? What do measures of children's brain activity tell us about what they know at different ages? How do differences between children and differences in their environments affect how children learn to talk? Answering these questions is a major challenge for researchers, but, in the first phase of LuCiD, we have made great strides towards meeting this challenge by bringing together researchers from a range of different research backgrounds and with a range of different research skills.
In its next phase, LuCiD will build on this success by coordinating three research streams in the UK and abroad.
STREAM 1: FROM VARIATION TO EXPLANATION: will take what we have discovered about word learning and grammatical development and use it to explain development in children with Developmental Language Disorder.
STREAM 2: FROM SIMPLE TO COMPLEX: will take what we have discovered about communicative development and use it to understand how different groups of children learn to use language to communicate in the more complicated real-world situations that they will encounter when they enter school.
STREAM 3: BEYOND 0-5: will build on LuCiD's 0-5 project - a study of 80 children's language learning across the first 5 years - by a) using the 0-5 data to understand how children's curiosity-based exploration shapes their word learning; b) using the 0-5 data to build individualized computer models of how particular children perform across different experiments and across development; and c) following the 0-5 children into school and determining how their preschool language abilities impact on the beginnings of their literacy development.
In this research, we will seek to understand language learning using a range of different methods. We will observe and record children in natural interaction as well as studying their language in more controlled experiments and using behavioural measures and correlations with brain activity (EEG). Combining information collected using these different methods will constrain the types of explanations that can be proposed; and using computer models to understand our results will help us to create more accurate and comprehensive theories of how children learn.
The next phase of LuCiD will also include a COMMUNICATIONS AGENDA, a TECHNOLOGY AGENDA and a CAPACITY BUILDING PROGRAMME.
In the COMMUNICATIONS AGENDA, we will work with our IMPACT CHAMPIONS to ensure that parents know how they can best help their children learn to talk, and to give healthcare and education professionals and policy-makers the information they need to create training and intervention programmes that are firmly rooted in the latest research findings.
In the TECHNOLOGY AGENDA, we will make the new tools and research designs that we have developed, and the new data that we have collected, available to other researchers and practitioners on an open access basis.
In the CAPACITY BUILDING PROGRAMME, we will train new researchers in the range of different methods used across the Centre, and in how to communicate their findings to parents, educational professionals and policy makers. This will ensure the long-term future of language development research in the UK and of our approach to understanding how children learn to talk.</p
English Housing Survey: Fuel Poverty Dataset, 2022
No full textAbstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The English Housing Survey (EHS) Fuel Poverty Datasets are comprised of fuel poverty variables derived from the EHS, and a number of EHS variables commonly used in fuel poverty reporting. The EHS is a continuous national survey commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Government (MHCLG) that collects information about people's housing circumstances and the condition and energy efficiency of housing in England. Safeguarded and Special Licence Versions Similar to the main EHS, two versions of the Fuel Poverty dataset are available from 2014 onwards. The Special Licence version contains additional, more detailed, variables, and is therefore subject to more restrictive access conditions. Users should check the Safeguarded Licence (previously known as End User Licence (EUL)) version first to see whether it meets their needs, before making an application for the Special Licence version. The English Housing Survey: Fuel Poverty Dataset, 2022 is the outcome of analysis conducted to produce estimates of fuel poverty in England in 2022 undertaken by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).Fuel poverty in England is measured using the Low Income Low Energy Efficiency (LILEE) indicator, which considers a household to be fuel poor if:it is living in a property with an energy efficiency rating of band D, E, F or G as determined by the most up-to-date Fuel Poverty Energy Efficiency Rating (FPEER) Methodology; andits disposable income (income after housing costs (AHC) and energy costs) would be below the poverty line. The poverty line (income poverty) is defined as an equivalised disposable income of less than 60 per cent of the national median in Section 2 of the ONS publication 'Persistent poverty in the UK and EU: 2017'.The Low Income Low Energy Efficiency model is a dual indicator, which allows us to measure not only the extent of the problem (how many fuel poor households there are), but also the depth of the problem (how badly affected each fuel poor household is). The depth of fuel poverty is calculated using the fuel poverty gap. This is the reduction in fuel costs needed for a household to not be in fuel poverty. This is either the change in required fuel costs associated with increasing the energy efficiency of a fuel poor household to a Fuel Poverty Energy Efficiency Rating (FPEER) of band C or reducing the costs sufficiently to meet the income threshold.The fuel poverty dataset is derived from the English Housing Survey, 2022 database created by the MHCLG. This database is constructed from fieldwork carried out between April 2021 and March 2023. The midpoint of this period is April 2022, which can be considered as the reference date for this dataset.Main Topics:A brief summary of each of the variables included in the English Housing Survey: Fuel Poverty Dataset, 2022 dataset is included in the study documentation. The variables can be grouped into the following categories:Low Income Low Energy Efficiency fuel poverty indicator variablesincome and fuel costs variables10 per cent affordability indicator variablesadditional fuel poverty variablesEnglish Housing Survey variablespolicy eligibility flagsweights</ul
Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence: Bangladesh Chittagong and Sylhet Rapid Virtual Survey, 2021
No full textAbstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) is a ten-year (2015-2025) research programme, funded by UK Aid from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), that seeks to combine longitudinal data collection and a mixed-methods approach to understand the lives of adolescents in particularly marginalized regions of the Global South, and to uncover 'what works' to support the development of their capabilities over the course of the second decade of life, when many of these individuals will go through key transitions such as finishing their education, starting to work, getting married and starting to have children.GAGE undertakes longitudinal research in seven countries in Africa (Ethiopia, Rwanda), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal) and the Middle East (Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine). Sampling adolescent girls and boys aged between 10‐19‐year olds, the quantitative survey follows a global total of 18,000 adolescent girls and boys, and their caregivers and explores the effects that programme have on their lives. This is substantiated by in‐depth qualitative and participatory research with adolescents and their peers. Its policy and legal analysis work stream studies the processes of policy change that influence the investment in and effectiveness of adolescent programming.Further information, including publications, can be found on the Overseas Development Institute GAGE website. Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence: Bangladesh Chittagong and Sylhet Rapid Virtual Survey, 2021 includes a sample of 650 girls and boys aged 11-19. The research sample, composed randomly selected adolescents and their families, was recruited during February and March 2020 from adolescents attending grades 7 and 8 across 109 government and monthly-pay-order (MPO) schools in the Chittagong and Sylhet Divisions of Bangladesh.This data are collected as part of a randomised evaluation of two virtual interventions delivered during COVID-19 related school closures through the Transforming Secondary Education for Results Operation in partnership with The World Bank: (1) a gender-neutral Growth Mindset (GM) programming around malleable intelligence and (2) Girl Rising (GR) programming that focuses on gender norms around girls' education that is layered on top of the GM programming. GAGE is not making information available for adolescents living in the intervention locations (66% of the sample) in this initial data release because the evaluation is ongoing and manuscripts using this data are still actively being written. The data on those adolescents will be released in a future update, once publications focusing on evaluation are finalised.Main Topics:The Rapid Virtual Survey dataset contains data from the survey administered to the CR and covers education, growth mindset and socio-econmic skills, marriage, voice and agency, paid work and empowerment, and plans for the future.</p
UK Furloughed Employees and Turnover Intention: Survey Data, 2022
No full textWith the end of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, furloughed employees were supposed to return to their old jobs, but they are facing the risk of redundancy as their employers are insolvent. In fact, up to half of furloughed employees will not return as they are sticking with their new opportunities which they had been forced to find during the pandemic and lockdowns. This research project aims to examine the influences of furlough-induced costs on employee’s relative deprivation (caused when furloughed employees tend to compare with others or their own power and status in the time of pre-pandemic) and in turn facilitating job turnover intention. More importantly, the research will also concentrate on the moderating roles of perceived autonomy support and self-efficacy on new opportunities as two key employee centric factors. Four business sectors (Retail, Accommodation and Food Services, Events, Manufacturing) will be selected. Findings will inform policy recommendations and managerial implications.
The data for this study has been collected in 2022 at the end of Covid-19. We looked furloughed employees job status and perceptions of how furlough shape their job decisions if they had been furloughed during the period of crisis. Several construct we looked into, such as relative deprivation, perceived autonomy support, financial and psychological costs, job searching self-efficacy, and job turnover intention
Taxing Ghosts: Closing Residency Loopholes to Fund Post-Pandemic Recovery Efforts, Digital Nomads: Metadata and Documentation, 2022-2025
No full textThis dataset is collected as part of a study examining the experiences of digital nomads, a rapidly emerging phenomenon in the global workforce. It focusses particularly on navigating visa systems, tax regulations, and other bureaucratic challenges across different countries. The study aims to explore how these administrative systems impact the ability of digital nomads to live and work internationally, highlighting both the benefits and obstacles they face in maintaining a mobile lifestyle.
Data is gathered through online interviews with digital nomads, who share firsthand experiences. Key topics include visa options for remote workers, managing international tax obligations, securing healthcare and insurance in different countries, and the complexities of legal residency. Participants also discuss how these systems influence their choices of destinations, the duration of their stays, and the feasibility of continuing their nomadic way of working.
This dataset provides qualitative insights into how digital nomads interact with and adapt to global administrative frameworks. It reveals the strategies they use to comply with regulations while maintaining a high degree of mobility. This research contributes to understanding how emerging global work patterns are shaped by and, in turn, shape international bureaucratic, in particular taxing systems.Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic depends on the ability of governments to find resources to fund essential public services. Most governments will need to do so by raising tax revenues. However, wealthy individuals have become impossible to tax effectively, as they are increasingly able to manipulate their legal residence into tax haven locations, in effect "ghosting" the tax systems from which they collectively benefit. Multinational corporations routinely book profits in tax favorable formats and locations, ghosting the very systems that have been built and maintained to make their existence and profitability possible. Ghosting is a global phenomenon that affects states both rich and poor, but its outsize impact on developing countries makes it a systemic threat to global economic stability, materializing into fiscal crisis in countries around the world. Reform proposals currently circulating at the international level focus on the specific needs of globally dominant (mostly wealthy) states, and do not fully contemplate the problem of ghosting as a systemic, worldwide phenomenon that must be addressed directly to build a tax system that will both enable the current post-Covid recovery and prepare for future pandemics and other fiscal shocks.
This project focuses on the international tax reform agenda that illuminates the systemic problem of ghosting and demonstrates the procedural and substantive reforms needed to address it. The significance of our research lies in our holistic, system-based approach, drawing on research and expertise from law, sociology, international migration studies, and African development studies to examine relevant legal and geo-political factors comprehensively. We will research the national and international factors that facilitate tax ghosting by wealthy individuals and corporations, demonstrate the disparate economic threats created by such tax ghosting, analyze why states have failed to recognize the threats to date, and propose novel yet feasible policy solutions based on our findings.</p
Progressive Rhetoric, Regressive Reality: The IMF's Tax Advice to 125 Countries, 2022–2024
No full textThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) has faced scrutiny over the alignment between its public rhetoric and actual policy advice vis-à-vis progressive taxation.
This collection analyzes the IMF's tax recommendations to 125 countries between 2022 and 2024, drawing on a novel dataset of 1049 tax reform proposals extracted from Article IV surveillance reports. While the IMF has publicly endorsed progressive taxation to reduce inequality and support fiscal sustainability, our findings reveal a disconnect between these statements and on-the-ground advice.
High-income countries were more likely to receive progressive tax guidance, whereas low- and middle-income countries were disproportionately advised to implement regressive measures, such as increases in value-added taxes and environmental taxes. Progressive tools like wealth and capital gains taxes were rarely recommended, and when they were, advice was concentrated in high-income contexts.
This pattern suggests that IMF tax policy advice continues to reflect orthodox priorities, emphasizing revenue mobilization over equity, and thereby undermining the Fund's professed commitment to inclusive economic policies.Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) are key actors in the spread of ideas, relying on their widely held legitimacy to influence policymakers around the world through a combination of coercion and persuasion. They devise rules and norms on issues as diverse as economic policy, health security, and environmental protection. Given the profound influence IGOs have on domestic policy decisions, the ideas these bodies represent are at the centre of current policy debates. Nonetheless, despite persistent academic attention, the avenues through which ideas travel from IGOs to domestic policymakers remain insufficiently understood. How do these ideas diffuse, where and when are these ideas implemented, and why do ideas become embedded in some countries but not others?
This project will be among the first to systematically examine the activities of IGO technical assistance missions. The three core research questions are:
1. Why do IGOs provide technical assistance?
2. How does IGO technical assistance spread ideas to domestic officials?
3. What effect does IGO technical assistance have on domestic policy?
To answer these questions, this project draws on recent theoretical advances in international relations and policy studies.
The focus of the empirical research will be the IGO underpinning the world economic order: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a central hub of knowledge on issues of key concern to developing countries, like fiscal and financial sector policies. The IMF presents a 'strategic research site', offering a unique analytical lens into the spread of policy norms to countries across the globe. The centrality of the organisation in global economic governance makes it a prime candidate for developing theoretical contributions that will be relevant to scholars across the social sciences.
The analysis will scrutinise the inner workings of IMF technical assistance activities, which account for one-quarter of the organisation's operating budget and is provided free-of-charge to requesting member countries. To study this phenomenon, the project will create a dataset of IMF technical assistance that systematizes information on all activities between 1990 and 2019, to be analysed using advanced quantitative methods. The project will also generate in-depth case studies of two frequent recipients of technical assistance-Kenya and Rwanda-by employing qualitative analyses of interviews with domestic officials and IMF staff. The research findings will contribute to academic debates on the diffusion of policy ideas by IGOs, and to policy debates on how to reform global governance.
What is at stake? IGOs typically court controversy because of the more conspicuous formal compliance mechanisms at their disposal-like the policy reforms governments must implement to obtain access to loans from international financial institutions. But profound influence is also exerted quietly in the background in providing domestic policymakers with routine technical assistance. These commonplace acts of persuasion are hidden from public scrutiny, and global governance institutions have been unaccountable for them. Consequently, this project aspires to lay the foundations for evidence-based policy debates on how IGOs provide technical assistance in order to increase public oversight and accountability for their actions.
The project is designed with a view to maximise impact for three groups of beneficiaries: academics, policymakers, and civil society. To effectively reach academic beneficiaries, the project will rely on academic articles, a book, conference organisation and attendance, and a reading group. To achieve non-academic impact, the project will rely on policy briefs, an interactive website, and pieces in popular media. To meet these objectives, the project will also draw on its Expert Advisory Board, and the institutional support of Royal Holloway's Department of Politics and International Relations.</p
Understanding and Contrasting Paediatricians’ Awareness of Common Diagnostics and Therapeutic Costs in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates: Survey, 2025
No full textHealthcare costs are rising globally, with a substantial portion attributed to wasteful practices. Physicians, due to their direct role in clinical decision-making, significantly influence healthcare spending. Existing literature consistently shows that many physicians lack accurate knowledge of healthcare costs.
This study assessed cost awareness, related behaviours, and attitudinal factors among paediatricians in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Bahrain.
An analytical, cross-sectional survey was administered to 259 licensed paediatricians (169 UAE, 90 Bahrain) via a structured questionnaire encompassing demographics, cost estimation accuracy, scenario-based decision-making, and attitudes toward cost-conscious care. Cost awareness was quantified using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), while cost-conscious behaviour was measured through a scenario-derived behavioural index.
The study revealed moderate overall cost awareness, with UAE-based paediatricians exhibiting significantly better estimation accuracy (MAPE = 24.88%) than their Bahrain-based counterparts (MAPE = 31.08%) (p = 0.004). Paediatricians in government institutions outperformed those in private settings (p = 0.021), and older physicians in the UAE showed marginally improved accuracy (ρ = –0.21, p = 0.006). Gender and institutional type significantly predicted cost-conscious behaviour but did not correlate with MAPE scores. Attitudinal scores toward cost-awareness were broadly favourable but were not significantly associated with knowledge or behavioural metrics.
This study highlights systemic and institutional factors as stronger determinants of paediatricians' cost awareness than individual demographics or access to cost data. The disconnect between confidence, behaviour, and actual knowledge underscores the urgent need for targeted educational interventions, cost transparency tools, and policy reforms
Modelling the Relationship Between Perfectionism, Self-compassion and Psychological Health Outcomes in Kidney Transplant Recipients, 2021-2022
No full textChronic kidney disease affects approximately 850 million people worldwide, imposing substantial psychological burdens in addition to physical ones. The Stress and Coping Cyclical Amplification Model of Perfectionism in Illness (SCCAMPI) outlines how perfectionism, via self-compassion, stress and coping, can affect psychological health outcomes such as illness symptoms and health-related behaviours.
These datasets form part of a study to test the SCCAMPI in a sample of kidney transplant recipients and a comparison group of people without kidney disease. Data were collected between July 2021 and August 2022 using Jisc Online Surveys.
Participants were 754 adults (354 kidney transplant recipients and 400 people without kidney disease) residing in the UK. Participants were recruited online via social media and the mailing lists of several kidney disease charities.
In addition to demographic information collected, measures used were: the Coping Efficacy Scale (CES); the Kidney Disease Quality of Life-36 (KDQOL-36); the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (SAPS); the Self-Compassion Scale short for (SCS-SF) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS).Perfectionism is characterised by excessive self-criticism and striving for excellence, but has been associated with poorer health outcomes in some clinical groups. This is sometimes buffered by self-compassion, a trait characterised by self-kindness and less self-judgement, but this has not yet been explored for kidney transplant recipients (KTRs). Three inter-connected studies were undertaken to assess how these self-attitudes were associated with stress, coping, health-related quality of life and intuitive eating for KTRs, based on an established model of perfectionism in illness.</p
Ministry of Justice Synthetic Data First Offender Assessment Dataset, England and Wales, 2011-2023
No full textAbstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Data First Synthetic Data Project aims to improve engagement with Data First datasets by making synthetic versions of content available to enable more rapid development of research proposals and to thereby enhance the potential for linked administrative data to improve understanding and outcomes across justice systems. The project has led the development of two components: a dataset generation platform and an initial release of lo-fidelity, synthetic data tables.This study includes a synthetically-generated version of the Ministry of Justice Data First Offender dataset. Synthetic versions of all 43 tables in the MoJ Data First data ecosystem have been created. These versions can be used / joined in the same way as the real datasets. As well as underpinning training, synthetic datasets should enable researchers to explore research questions and to design research proposals prior to submitting these for approval. The code created during this exploration and design process should then enable initial results to be obtained as soon as data access is granted.
The Ministry of Justice Data First Offender Assessment dataset provides data on offender assessments recorded for service users in custody and in the community system in England and Wales from 01/01/2011. The data has been extracted from the Offender Assessment System (OASys), used by His Majesty's Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) in England and Wales to measure the risks and needs of offenders in custody or under supervision in the community.
This dataset allows users to:
- assess how likely an offender is to be re-convicted, by identifying and classifying offending-related needs, including basic personality characteristics and cognitive behavioural problems
- assess risk of serious harm, risks to the individual and other risks
- link assessments to the supervision or sentence plan
- assess answers to questions from different assessment types
- measure change during the period of supervision / sentence
Each record in the dataset gives information about a single person and their OASys assessments. There are separate tables covering different assessment types for example, Basic Custody Screening (BCS), core risks and Spousal Assault Risk assessments (SARA). As part of Data First, records have been deidentified and deduplicated, using our probabilistic record linkage package, Splink, so that a unique identifier is assigned to all records believed to relate to the same person, allowing for longitudinal analysis and investigation of repeat interactions with the Offender Assessment System. This opens up the potential to better understand the Offender Assessment System and address questions on, for example, how criminogenic needs change throughout time within the criminal justice system and what risks and needs can lead to reappearances within the justice system.
The Ministry of Justice Data First linking dataset can be used in combination with this and other Data First datasets to join up administrative records about people from across justice services (courts, prisons and probation) to increase understanding around users' interactions, pathways and outcomes.</p