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Causal Effects of the Timing of Life-course Events: Age at Retirement and Subsequent Health
Get PDFIn this article, we combine the extensive literature on the analysis of life-course trajectories as sequences with the literature on causal inference and propose a new matching approach to investigate the causal effect of the timing of life-course events on subsequent outcomes. Our matching approach takes into account pre-event confounders that are both time-independent and time-dependent as well as life-course trajectories. After matching, treated and control individuals can be compared using standard statistical tests or regression models. We apply our approach to the study of the consequences of the age at retirement on subsequent health outcomes, using a unique data set from Swedish administrative registers. Once selectivity in the timing of retirement is taken into account, effects on hospitalization are small, while early retirement has negative effects on survival. Our approach also allows for heterogeneous treatment effects. We show that the effects of early retirement differ according to preretirement income, with higher income individuals tending to benefit from early retirement, while the opposite is true for individuals with lower income
Cultural capital, teacher bias, and educational success: New evidence from monozygotic twins
Get PDFIn this paper we use new data on Danish monozygotic (MZ) twins to analyze the effect of cultural capital on educational success. We report three main findings. First, cultural capital has a positive direct effect on the likelihood of completing the college-bound track in Danish secondary education. Second, cultural capital leads teachers to form upwardly biased perceptions of children's academic ability, but only when their exposure to chil-dren's cultural capital is brief (as in oral and written exams) rather than long (as in grades awarded at the end of the school year). Third, we find that the positive direct effect of cultural capital on educational success is higher for children from high-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds than for those from low-SES backgrounds. This result suggests that high-SES children are more likely to be in schooling contexts that enable them to convert cultural capital into educational success
Time for a revival? A historical review of the social survey in Great Britain and the United States
Get PDFDuring the 1980s, the history of the social survey method in the UK and the US evoked significant scholarly attention; however, this has waned in recent years. Drawing on this historical literature, I review the origins and development of the social survey to its current ubiquity in serving the information needs of modern societies. Two pivotal moments set the direction for this history: first, the publication of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London in the late nineteenth century, which inspired numerous further studies to replicate his approach; second, World War II, which provided the applied research opportunity that established the social survey as an indispensable tool in public policy. Although historians acknowledge the growth of survey research in the post-war era, there has been limited discussion of the trends that shaped this expansion. I identify the processes of institutionalisation, professionalisation and economisation as setting the course for social survey methods during this period. The emergence of historical reflection on the survey method in the late twentieth century responded to a new transitional moment in its history. Commentators argued for a greater integration of theory in empirical findings to enable the survey to continue to function effectively in the production of “argumentative knowledge” (Philip Abrams, in Bulmer 1985:x), which is central to its critical social function. I argue for the value of methodological history to enable the survey method, and its practitioners, to reflectively appraise the idiosyncrasies of its development, current practices and future prospects
Participant observation in rural Mexico: what my child taught me
No full textProfessor Laura A. Lewis, Department of Modern Languages, University of Southampton speaks at the QUEST (Qualitative Expertise at Southampton) Seminar on Ethnographic Approaches. www.quest.soton.ac.u
The NCRM quick start guide to: Three approaches used in research methods teaching
Get PDFNCRM trainers, like all teachers of research methods, grapple with the challenge of supporting learners to develop the methodological competences needed to conduct robust research. The NCRM Pedagogy of Methodological learning project1 has identified a host of teaching approaches being used across the social sciences for methods and methodology. In this guide we outline three broad, respected and inter-related approaches: active learning, experiential learning and student-centred learning. Our aim is to make methods teaching practices more transparent and knowable, and to stimulate debate about how we think about methods teaching and training
Automated Zone Design in Practice - Webinar
No full textThis is a recording of the first NCRM webinar. The webinar was held on 6th June 2017. Professor Dave Martin talks about Automated zone design in practice. At the end of the webinar Prof Martin answers questions from the webinar attendees. The attendees were asked to watch NCRM online resoure on Principles of automated zone design before attending the webinar: https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/resources/online/automated_zone_design
Telling a longitudinal story
No full textAcross the social sciences, there is widespread agreement that quantitative longitudinal research designs offer analysts powerful scientific data resources. However, a large number of texts on social survey analysis are written from a statistical, rather than a social science data analysis perspective with little or no focus on common practical challenges. In this episode of the Methods Podcast, Professor Vernon Gayle from the University of Edinburgh talks about longitudinal data and his soon-to-be published book, What is Quantitative Longitudinal Data Analysis? which provides those interested in longitudinal research with a practical and accessible guide
NCRM podcast: Digging deep! The archaeological metaphor helping researchers get into Big Qual
No full textWorking across qualitative data sets is a relatively new but nevertheless exciting proposition, but can it be done well and with integrity? In this episode of the Methods Podcast, we talk to Dr Susie Weller from the University of Southampton who, with colleagues (Prof Rosalind Edwards, Prof Lynn Jamieson and Dr Emma Davidson) and as part of an NCRM funded research project, has developed an archeological metaphor to do just that
Ensuring the confidentiality of statistical outputs from the ADRN
Get PDFThe ADRN has a proven safe mechanism to manage research use and outputs of confidential data. However, because the data that the researchers use are sensitive, it is possible that the publication of statistical analyses could inadvertently lead to the disclosure of sensitive information.
Many years of experience in managing research outputs, with very few problems, shows that there is a negligible risk of such a disclosure – but that risk does exist. Outputs are checked by researchers and trained output checkers before they are published. This is called ‘output statistical disclosure control’, or OSDC. As a result of this, statistical disclosure risk is reduced.
This guide is intended for: researchers who need to learn what OSDC is and how that relates to their work; data owners who are concerned about inadvertent disclosure of results; the wider public who are interested in how the ADRN’s security model (the ‘Five Safes’) works to encourage research while protecting confidentiality
How collective is collective efficacy? The importance of consensus in judgments about community cohesion
Get PDFExisting studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondent ratings of the local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood, resulting in a substantive focus on variation in its average between neighborhoods. In this paper, we focus on the variability in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus amongst residents, we use a mixed-effects location scale model, with variability in the consensus of judgments treated as an additional neighborhood-level random effect. Our results confirm that neighborhoods differ, not just in their overall levels of collective efficacy, but also in the extent to which residents agree with one another in their assessments. In accord with findings for US cities, our results show consensus in CE assessments is affected by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods in London. Additionally, we show that heterogeneity in collective efficacy assessments is consequential, with higher levels of worry about crime and risk avoidance behavior in areas where CE consensus is low