10259 research outputs found
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A Service Evaluation of Psycho-Social Support Pathways within Trans and Gender Diverse Healthcare: Interview Data, 2025
No full textTrans and gender diverse (TGD) people experience poorer health outcomes in comparison to their cisgender counterparts. These poor health outcomes for TGD young people are, in part, explained by exposure to minority stress (e.g., discrimination due to their minoritized identities).
Positively, research suggests that social support can be helpful for mediating this relationship between minority stress and poor health outcomes, highlighting that it may be beneficial to integrate social support into gender-affirming care. However, this social support needs to be meaningful (i.e., offer them a sense of belonging and access to psychological support that groups can provide) in order to mitigate against negative health outcomes.
Resultantly, this research conducted a service evaluation of one gender clinic in England. They are the first gender clinic to begin incorporating social support into their model of care. Open-ended survey data was collected from 30 service users, reflecting 10% of total service users.
This evaluation allowed to understand whether social support delivered through an NHS pathway allows meaningful social connections that enhance health to be developed, or whether these are experienced as too artificial in comparison to finding social support through their own volition.Trans and gender diverse (TGD) people experience poorer health outcomes in comparison to their cisgender counterparts. These poor health outcomes for TGD young people are, in part, explained by exposure to minority stress (e.g., discrimination due to their minoritized identities). Positively, research suggests that social support can be helpful for mediating this relationship between minority stress and poor health outcomes, highlighting that it may be beneficial to integrate social support into gender-affirming care. However, this social support needs to be meaningful (i.e., offer them a sense of belonging and access to psychological support that groups can provide) in order to mitigate against negative health outcomes. Resultantly, this research conducted a service evaluation of one gender clinic in England. They are the first gender clinic to begin incorporating social support into their model of care. We collected open-ended survey data from 30 service users, reflecting 10% of total service users. This evaluation allowed us to understand whether social support delivered through an NHS pathway allows meaningful social connections that enhance health to be developed, or whether these are experienced as too artificial in comparison to finding social support through their own volition.</p
Ethnographic Research Data on Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy in Indonesia, 2020–2025
No full textHypnotherapy is very popular in contemporary Indonesia, where it is used to address medical and emotional problems, but also penetrates many aspects of everyday life. Hypnoteaching and hypnomotivation are becoming widespread in Indonesian schools; ever more families are experimenting with hypnoparenting; employers uses hypnotherapy to help manage their workforce. In the process, Indonesian citizens are being asked to understand, relate to, and govern themselves in new ways informed by psycho-therapeutic discourses of hypnosis and suggestion. Such developments raise three broad sets of questions:
1) Empirical questions regarding the modes of hypnotherapeutic practice that are gaining ground in Indonesia, and the forms of subjectivity, sociality, and governance that are emerging as a consequence;
2) Analytical questions regarding how and why these regimes of practice—and their associated modes of subjectivity, sociality, and governance—have come about, and are being transformed or maintained;
3) Broader theoretical questions regarding the ways that Indonesian hypnotherapy practices might shed new light on what Blackman (2007) has termed the ‘suggestive realm’ of human experience.
This project sought to contribute to all three of these fields of enquiry via an ethnographic study of the Indonesian hypnotherapy circuit and its socio-cultural ramifications. Semi-structured interviewing of therapists generated rich qualitative accounts of how and why their practice and understanding of hypnotherapy has evolved over time. I collected life stories of 150 therapists with a view to documenting the full range of experiences prompted by encounters with hypnotherapeutic discourse. Interviews were relaxed and exploratory, focusing on identifying key stages and turning points in their training and professional practice, their life experiences prior to training, their experience of their family life and social relations, and their broader aspirations for their town, province, and country.Hypnotherapy is becoming big business in Indonesia. Over 31,000 Indonesians have trained as 'certified hypnotists' with the Indonesian Board of Hypnotherapy since it was founded in 2002. Many more have trained with rival associations. Their services are used in various ways. Some treat clients seeking therapy for medical, emotional or personal issues. Elsewhere, hypnosis has become embedded within schools, workplaces and the family home, where it is used to educate, motivate, and secure a brighter future for Indonesia as a nation.
This project, which builds on pilot research by the PI, will be the first ever dedicated ethnographic study of hypnotherapy. Combining intensive participant observation of the hypnotherapy scene in three Indonesian towns with semi-structured interviews of hypnotherapists and their clients, it will examine why so many people in Indonesia have come to embrace hypnotherapy, why they practice it as they do, and the influence that learning about hypnotherapy has had on their everyday lives. Time will also be spent conducting research in Malaysia (Indonesia's primary export market for hypnotherapy training) and discussing the data with British hypnosis associations, so as to illuminate, and gain critical perspectives on, the ways that the experience and practice of hypnotherapy can be shaped by specific national histories and cultural traditions.
The project addresses core theoretical issues in anthropology. A priority for medical anthropology is to understand how and why cosmopolitan therapeutic forms are embraced, rejected, or modified as they move around the globe. This project will illuminate Indonesians' motivations for engaging with hypnotherapy, the challenges therapists encounter as they attempt to implement principles and procedures devised in Euro-American settings within the Indonesian context, and the strategies they adopt to overcome these. It will thus shed light on how and why therapeutic vernacularisation occurs. But it will also make a contribution to psychological anthropology by revealing the possible limitations of Euro-American theories of hypnosis and suggestion for understanding hypnotic interactions in a setting where cultural traditions, postcolonial histories and perspectives on one's global situation differ markedly from those in the secular West.
The project will also offer a timely portrait of the forms of psychological governance, subjectivity and sociality that are emerging under the Jokowi Presidency, which has called for a 'Mental Revolution' amongst Indonesia's population. Given its standing as the world's fourth most populous nation, tenth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, and a major emerging market, there are clear strategic interests in understanding the socio-cultural transformations underway in Indonesian society. An ethnographic study of hypnotherapy will illuminate the problems and difficulties with which Indonesians are currently grappling, leading them to undertake hypnotherapy in the first place. It will also critically examine how exposure to the concept and practice of 'hypnotherapy'--which, as noted earlier, is not confined to 'clinical' spaces but becoming increasingly embedded in the everyday routines of schools, workplaces and family homes--is leading to new ways of relating to oneself and others.
Besides scholarly outputs, the project will culminate in a UK-based exhibition and associated programme of talks, informing audiences about hypnotherapy and its cross-cultural manifestations whilst spurring them to reflect critically on the values and histories underpinning their own commitments to particular forms of therapeutic practice.</p
Fiction Book Reading and Wellbeing: A Qualitative Investigation Across the Lifespan, 2023-2024
No full textThis project aimed to examine readers’ perspectives of the relationship between their fiction book reading and wellbeing, focusing on three wellbeing concepts (positive affect, connection, personal growth) to gain depth of understanding into these. In addition, the social contexts of their reading experiences were also examined. The study took a lifespan approach, through individual interviews (total n = 78) with children (n = 24, aged 9-11), young people (n = 19, aged 15-17), adults (n = 20, aged 31-46) and older adults (n = 15 aged 63-83). More details of the project, including outputs to date, can be found here: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/literacylab/previous-projects/readwell/This project examined readers’ perspectives of the relationship between their fiction book reading and wellbeing (positive affect, connection, personal growth) across the lifespan. In individual interviews, children (n = 24, aged 9-11), young people (n = 19, aged 15-17), adults (n = 20, aged 31-46) and older adults (n = 15 aged 63-83) answered the same interview questions to reflect on their fiction book reading experiences in relation to these wellbeing concepts, in addition to the social context of their reading experiences.</p
Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations Survey: Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Low Carbon Lifestyles in the UK, Brazil, Sweden and China, Wave 2, 2021
No full textThis online survey was part of the visioning research conducted at the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations. The research project, of which this survey forms a crucial part of is titled 1.4. Public perceptions of climate change and transformative action over time. The aim of this project is to examine public perceptions of climate change in the context of the Centre’s core principles, diet, transport, material consumption, thermal comfort, by conducting multi-wave, multi-country (UK, Brazil, China, Sweden) surveys.
This current survey forms the second wave of a survey that was run annually for 4 consecutive years, including tracking items and bespoke, flexible modules every year. The aim of this survey wave 2 was to map climate change beliefs and engagement with the 4 key areas (diet, transport, material consumption, thermal comfort) across the UK, Brazil, China and Sweden and zoom in on public perception of policy making processes, perceived responsibility for action, and the Paris Climate Agreement.
This sample collected data from 1 001 respondents in the UK, 1001 in China, 1023 in Sweden and 1011 in Brazil adopting quota sampling representative of each country.The Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) will be a global hub for understanding the profound changes required to address climate change. At its core, is a fundamental question of enormous social significance: how can we as a society live differently - and better - in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid and far-reaching emission reductions?
While there is now strong international momentum on action to tackle climate change, it is clear that critical targets (such as keeping global temperature rise to well within 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels) will be missed without fundamental transformations across all parts of society. CAST's aim is to advance society's understanding of how to transform lifestyles, organisations and social structures in order to achieve a low-carbon future, which is genuinely sustainable over the long-term.
Our Centre will focus on people as agents of transformation in four challenging areas of everyday life that impact directly on climate change but have proven stubbornly resistant to change: consumption of goods and physical products, food and diet, travel, and heating/cooling. We will work across multiple scales (individual, community, organisational, national and global) to identify and experiment with various routes to achieving lasting change in these challenging areas. In particular, we will test how far focussing on 'co-benefits' will accelerate the pace of change. Co-benefits are outcomes of value to individuals and society, over and above the benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These may include improved health and wellbeing, reduced waste, better air quality, greater social equality, security, and affordability, as well as increased ability to adapt and respond to future climate change. For example, low-carbon travel choices (such as cycling and car sharing) may bring health, social and financial benefits that are important for motivating behaviour and policy change. Likewise, aligning environmental and social with economic objectives is vital for behaviour and organisational change within businesses.
Our Research Themes recognise that transformative change requires: inspiring yet workable visions of the future (Theme 1); learning lessons from past and current societal shifts (Theme 2); experimenting with different models of social change (Theme 3); together with deep and sustained engagement with communities, business and governments, and a research culture that reflects our aims and promotes action (Theme 4).
Our Centre integrates academic knowledge from disciplines across the social and physical sciences with practical insights to generate widespread impact. Our team includes world-leading researchers with expertise in climate change behaviour, choices and governance. We will use a range of theories and research methods to fill key gaps in our understanding of transformation at different spatial and social scales, and show how to target interventions to impactful actions, groups and moments in time.
We partner with practitioners (e.g., Climate Outreach, Greener-UK, China Centre for Climate Change Communication), policy-makers (e.g., Welsh Government) and companies (e.g., Anglian Water) to develop and test new ways of engaging with the public, governments and businesses in the UK and internationally. We enhance citizens', organisations' and societal leaders' capacity to tackle climate change through various mechanisms, including secondments, citizens' panels, small-scale project funding, seminars, training, workshops, papers, blog posts and an interactive website. We will also experiment with transformations within academia itself, by trialling sustainable working practices (e.g., online workshops), being 'reflexive' (studying our own behaviour and its impacts on others), and making our outputs and data publically available.</p
Harnessing Metacognition to Assess the Accuracy of Memory Reports From Children in the Criminal Justice System, 2021-2024
No full textChildren's metacognitive cues can be used to determine the accuracy of the information in their testimony, but existing research using limited measures has not provided a strong basis for informing practice. New advances and the PI's pilot data suggest the potential of this approach can now be realised. A metacognitive cue could be a confidence rating (with high confidence indicating high accuracy), or non-verbal, such as shrugs (indicating low accuracy). We will test children ages 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11, to advance understanding about metacognitive development and determine which cues could be used to assess the likely accuracy of information. For the first time, we will investigate novel metacognitive cues that are likely to be informative of accuracy in younger children, and employ statistical techniques that allow us separately to measure different elements of performance: their memory accuracy and metacognitive ability.
Moreover, there is a gap between metacognitive research and its use in the real-world. We will address this by creating and testing police officer training to improve their ability to assess the accuracy of information from children, by using children's metacognitive cues. We will also work with legal practitioners and other experts to develop recommendations (for practice, policy, and future research), for assessing child memory evidence worldwide.
Our goal is to impact a range of legal decision-makers who are required to assess child memory accuracy, as well as government agencies, policy-makers, and organisations responsible for child protection and victim advocacy. To ensure outcomes are of practical use to these communities, they will guide the project throughout.
Empirical data and coding schemes for child memory and metacognition experiments (recognition and cued recall) and a police training study on how to interpret memory evidence from children.Each year, millions of child witnesses, from as young as 2 years old, provide evidence based on their memory of events in Criminal Justice Systems around the world. Child witnesses, including victims, are increasingly being asked to remember what they experienced by police officers during an investigation. These recollections can go on to be recounted to a courtroom, as key evidence during a trial.
The accuracy of child memory evidence needs to be correctly assessed at multiple stages of the legal process to ensure its reliability: police officers determine which investigatory leads they should prioritise based on testimony; prosecutors decide if the evidence is strong enough to charge the suspect with an offence; judges decide if the evidence is reliable enough to be allowed in the courtroom; and jurors decide whether the evidence warrants the suspect receiving a guilty verdict.
Currently, no policy or practice guidance exists to assess the accuracy of children's memory evidence. The PI's work has made it clear that legal practitioners recognise the lack of empirically-informed guidance. Some guidance exists to try to determine if a child is lying. But few children intentionally fabricate testimony, and most honest accounts contain both accurate and inaccurate information. With no guidance, legal decision-makers largely rely on witness age to decide whether to trust memory evidence. This is problematic. Age often does not predict accuracy, and cannot discriminate between accurate and inaccurate information within an individual's testimony. Relying on age has resulted in miscarriages of justice: children have been seriously injured or murdered after their testimony was erroneously deemed to be less accurate than an adult's, and innocent people have been wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.
Our project will determine how legal decision-makers (e.g. police officers, prosecutors, judges, jurors) could estimate the accuracy of information in honest memory reports from children. It will do that by investigating and harnessing a previously overlooked, but crucially informative, aspect of memory: metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to monitor when our own memories are accurate or inaccurate.</p
Love to Read: A Co-Designed Intervention to Motivate And Engage Child Readers, 2021-2022
No full textInterest in school-based practices to increase children’s book reading motivation and engagement has intensified, due to growing recognition of declines in children’s reading attitudes and regular reading outside of school, yet evidence of the wide range of benefits associated with reading books. This project aimed to co-create a programme, Love to Read, by drawing upon research, children's insights (Phase 1), and teachers' professional and pedagogical expertise (Phase 2), before assessing acceptability and feasibility and initial evidence of effectiveness (Phase 3). Framed around six key principles: access, choice, time, connection, social and success, the programme was co-created and evaluated. Data associated with Phase 1 (59 children) and Phase 3 (425 children) is anonymised and uploaded. Phase 2 data cannot be uploaded as requests to make data publicly available were not made due to the small sample size and anonymity concerns (6 teachers).There is evidence of continued declines in children's self-reported reading enjoyment and engagement. This project aimed to co-design a programme to increase children's (aged 8-11) reading motivation and engagement, specifically in relation to book reading. It included three phases: 1) Qualitative insights from children to inform the programme; 2) Co-design of the programme with teachers and other professionals; 3) Evaluation of programme, with a focus on acceptability and feasibility. The data uploaded refers to Phase 1 (qualitative data collected only) and Phase 3 (quantitative and qualitative data collected). Both studies were preregistered and can be found here: Phase 1: https://osf.io/5ztjk and Phase 3: https://osf.io/qvuka. All materials associated with data collection are attached to the preregistrations.</p
Government Participation in Virtual Negotiations: Evidence From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Approval Sessions, 2023-2025
No full textThe Covid-19 pandemic challenged global governance in unprecedented ways by requiring intergovernmental meetings to be held online. For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this meant that the intergovernmental approval of the key findings of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) had to be conducted virtually.
In this research, we assess how the move away from face-to-face meetings affected country participation in IPCC approval sessions. Our findings demonstrate that virtual meetings increased the size of member governments’ delegations, but this did not necessarily translate into a greater number of interventions during the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) as time zone differences reduced engagement levels significantly—particularly for countries from the Pacific, East Asian, and Latin American regions whose delegations often found themselves in IPCC meetings late at night and early in the morning.
These results offer initial, empirically robust evidence about what online meetings can and cannot achieve for promoting more inclusive global governance at a time when the IPCC and other organizations reflect on the future use of virtual and hybrid meeting formats.
The data used in this analysis relies on three original sources.
First, we source information about country delegations for IPCC AR5 and AR6 for all three Working Group (WG) reports and the Synthesis Report from publicly available session documents published by the IPCC Secretariat. Session information and links to these documents are provided in Appendix B of the Climatic Change publication. These data allow us to create measures of the size of country delegations, which meetings they attended, and the gender breakdown of each delegation.
Second, we use country mentions from Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) reports for IPCC Approval Plenary meetings for WGII and WGIII during AR6. These are available from the ENB website. We use this information to create our engagement measure.
Third, we use information from the daily schedules from IPCC Approval Plenaries for WGII and WGIII mettings during AR6. As accredited researchers, we had access to these documents which allowed us to create a data set that record which negotiation item/headline statement was negotiated when. Combining these data with information about time zones in each delegation's home country, allows us to analyse the effect of time zones on engagement of delegations in IPCC intergovernmental negotiations.International climate talks in Katowice, Poland, in 2018 descended into acrimony over a scientific landmark report by the most authoritative international body on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, and the United States--four big oil and gas producers--refused to endorse an IPCC special report. This report stated that limiting global warming to 1.5C reduces climate-related risks, but requires deep emission reductions in all sectors. Since these reductions are costly, governments may have political incentives to try to influence how these reports are written and used. We study how and under what conditions governments seek to influence the production of science in the IPCC; and the effects of this attempted influence on climate negotiations and domestic climate policymaking.
Our research comes at a vital moment for international climate politics. In order to meet the 1.5C-2C temperature target agreed in the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries need to increase their climate action. As the pressure to decarbonise the global economy mounts, the IPCC's forthcoming Sixth Assessment Report in 2022 will provide states with the latest knowledge on the scientific basis; impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability; and mitigation of climate change. The key findings from this comprehensive assessment will serve as scientific input to United Nations climate negotiations and guide governments' climate policies for the decade to come. Despite its key role, the IPCC's 6-8 year assessment cycles have come under repeated criticism for different reasons. Our systematic study of countries' engagement with IPCC processes will hence contribute to the practical and scholarly discussion on how the IPCC can best fulfil its mandate of being policy-relevant in the new climate landscape the Paris Agreement has created.
In this unique context, we will offer new theoretical and empirical insights into the strategies, conditions, and effects of attempted government influence in international climate science policy. The theoretical framework, which we will develop, will allow us to analyse governments' strategic involvement in the production of IPCC reports and their uptake in climate policymaking. While "interference" and "obstruction" at both stages is documented in the literature, our framework will help us to hypothesise how, when, and with what effects governments seek influence in the global climate science-policy interface. Our systematic empirical analysis will benefit from a mixed methods approach. We will combine qualitative and quantitative methods, including elite interviews; participant observation; comparative case studies; document analysis; regression models; and text-as-data approaches. This multifaceted approach will enrich our empirical understanding of government influence in the IPCC and will help us to overcome the methodological challenge that government influence is not always readily observable.
Together with our advisory board, which includes senior IPCC leadership and assessment authors, and through partnerships with leading climate research institutes--CICERO (Center for International Climate Research) in Norway; PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) in Germany; Cardiff University's Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST); and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK--we intend to create impact from translating our research findings into feasible and implementable proposals to inform ongoing discussions about IPCC reform. We will furthermore present our findings at the United Nations climate conference in winter 2023 and, over the course of the project, disseminate our research to a wider audience through blog posts, podcasts, and on social media.</p
Role of Iconicity in Children's Production of Adverbial Clauses: Experimental Data, 2022-2023
No full textYoung children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018).
The present study tests children's sentence production across four different connective types (after, before, because, if) to determine whether the factors that underpin the comprehension of adverbial clauses also apply to production, which involves utterance planning and articulation. 42 four-year-old, 42 five-year-old, and 22 eight-year-old monolingual English-speaking children, along with 20 adult controls, completed a sentence completion task.
The results showed that both four- and five-year-olds produced all type of sentences in iconic order (“She builds a tower, before she breaks her train”; “After she builds a tower, she breaks her train”) more accurately than in non-iconic order. This suggests that while comprehension and production likely impose different demands on children, iconicity as a general semantic strategy benefits children's early processing of adverbial clauses. Moreover, the effect of iconicity persisted in older children's production, but only for their because- and if-sentences, which could be related to their semantic complexity and the pragmatic properties they encode.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
Employers’ Digital Practices at Work Survey, 2021-2023
No full textEmployers’ Digital Practices at Work Survey is a nationally representative survey of employers’ adoption and use of new digital technologies, including AI and machine-learning.
The survey explores the use of traditional information and communication technology (ICT) and well as employers’ use of new artificial intelligence and machine-learning enabled technologies, data analytics, workforce staffing and human resource management practices.
The sampling frame used for the survey was drawn from the Dunn and Bradstreet business directory. Stratified sampling was employed using the intersection of industry (based on the Standard Industrial Classification) and firm size (organised in bands of organisations with 10-19, 20-49, 50-99, 100-249,and 250+ employees) as the primary sampling unit. The sampling frame covers all regions in England, plus Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The sampling frame includes establishments with more than 10 employees.
Two waves of the survey were conducted: Wave 1 (November 2021 - June 2022); Wave 2 (2023).The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Dig.IT) will establish itself as an essential resource for those wanting to understand how new digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the world of work. Digitalisation is a topical feature of contemporary debate. For evangelists, technology offers new opportunities for those seeking work and increased flexibility and autonomy for those in work. More pessimistic visions, in contrast, see a future where jobs are either destroyed by robots or degraded through increasingly precarious contracts and computerised monitoring. Take Uber as an example: the company claims it is creating opportunities for self-employed entrepreneurs; while workers' groups increasingly challenge such claims through legal means to improve their rights at work.
While such positive and pessimistic scenarios abound of an increasingly fragmented, digitalised and flexible transformation of work across the globe, theoretical understanding of contemporary developments remains underdeveloped and systematic empirical analyses are lacking. We know, for example, that employers and governments are struggling to cope with and understand the pace and consequences of digital change, while individuals face new uncertainties over how to become and stay 'connected' in turbulent labour markets. Yet, we have no real understanding of what it means to be a 'connected worker' in an increasing 'connected' economy. Drawing resources from different academic fields of study, Dig.IT will provide an empirically innovative and international broad body of knowledge that will offer authoritative insights into the impact of digitalisation on the future of work.
The Dig.IT centre will be jointly led by the Universities of Sussex and Leeds, supported by leading experts from Aberdeen, Cambridge, Manchester and Monash Universities. Its core research programme will cover four broad-ranging research themes. Theme one will set the conceptual and quantitative base for the centre's activities. Theme two involves a large-scale survey of Employers' Digital Practices at Work. Theme three involves qualitative research on employers' and employees' experiences of digitalisation at work across 4 sectors (Creative industries, Business Services, Consumer Services, Public Services). Theme 4 examines how the disconnected attempt to reconnect, through Public Employment Services, the growth of new types of self-employment, platform work and workers' responses to building new forms of voice and representation in an international context. Specific projects include:
1. The Impact of Digitalisation on Work and Employment
-Conceptualising digital futures, historically, regionally and internationally
-Comparative regulation of digital employment
- Mapping regional and international trends of digital technology and work
2. Employers' Digital Practices at Work Survey
3. Employers' and employees' experiences of digital work across sectors
-Changing management processes and practices
-Workers' experiences of digital transformation
4. Reconnecting the disconnected: new channels of voice and representation
- displaced workers, job search and the public employment service
- self-employment, interest representation and voice
Dig.IT will establish a Data Observatory on digital futures at work to promote our findings through an interactive website, report on a series of methodological seminars and new experimental methods and deliver extensive outreach activities. It will act as a one-platform library of resources at the forefront of research on digital work and will establish itself as a focal point for decision-makers across the policy spectrum, connecting with industrial strategy, employment and welfare policy. It will also manage an Innovation Fund designed to fund novel research ideas, from across the academic community as they emerge over the life course of the centre.</p
Egyptian Parliamentary Speeches, 1924-1952
No full textThis research program aims at developing a new historical political economy of the Middle East that explains the economic roots of authoritarianism in the region. It theoretically and empirically investigates how demands for democratization could emerge from intra-elite conflicts in an agrarian economy, despite the lack of an industrial bourgeoisie, and how elite politics shift with colonialism and postcolonial regimes. While elite conflicts can lead to democratization, they can alternatively result in autocracy. Furthermore, colonialism and postcolonial military coups could curtail these developments leading to episodes of democratic opening and authoritarian backsliding. The research program tests this by examining elite politics in Egypt, using a novel database on parliament members from 1824 to 2020, and parliamentary speeches in 1866–1882 and 1924–1952.
This dataset covers the universe of speeches made in the Egyptian House of Representatives (Majlis al-Nuwwab) in 1924-1952. The dataset was constructed by the data creators from high-quality images of the Arabic-language minutes of the daily meetings of parliament created and made available online by the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, Japan. The data construction consisted of three stages: (1) image segmentation into text block images, (2) implementing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the corpus of text block images using Google Document AI, and (3) extraction of speeches and speaker names using OpenAI. The dataset is at the speech level. It provides the following information for each speech: text body of the speech, speaker's full name, politician ID (including whether speaker is member of parliament or minister), date of meeting, parliamentary session, and parliamentary cycle. While most of these speeches are made by members of parliament and ministers, other speakers include high-level bureaucrats and members of the public who presented petitions to the parliament