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Using mobile devices to understand spending
No full textThe development of mobile technology has brought with it some exciting opportunities for those interested in collecting data from households about their finances. Researchers based at the University of Essex who run the UK Household Longitudinal Study have been working to gain a better understanding of household finances through better measurement. In this episode of the Methods Podcast, Professor Annette Jäckle talks about the opportunities and challenges that mobile technology brings researchers involved in the collection and use of household survey data. She also outlines an experiment that she and colleagues have been running in which survey participants were asked to download and use an app on a phone or tablet to collect and record information about their household spending
Anonymisation theory and practice
No full textIn this webinar, organised by NCRM, we discuss the ideas and principles that underpin the concept of anonymisation. The speaker (Professor Mark Elliot, NCRM, University of Manchester) demystifies the term and other related concepts and argues for a holistic, functional approach to the topic. He then go on to describe a practical system to the anonymisation called the "Anonymisation Decision-making Framework"
Methods that teach: Developing pedagogic research methods, developing pedagogy
Get PDFThis paper addresses ways of researching the pedagogy involved in building research methods competencies in the social sciences. The lack of explicit and shared pedagogy in this area make it particularly important that research is conducted to stimulate pedagogic culture, dialogue and development. The authors discuss the range of methods used in one study with the aim of teasing out pedagogical content knowledge, making implicit pedagogic knowledge more explicit and thereby malleable. The research design and methods deliberately foster dialogue with, rather than cast a judgmental gaze upon, teachers and learners of research methods. Rejecting observational methods on this basis, and declining action research because of the level of participant pedagogic knowledge and commitment required, the authors examine a combination of expert panel, video stimulated dialogue and diary methods for building pedagogic knowledge and culture. These ‘methods that teach’ are argued to offer value for other researchers working in new and emerging teaching fields, where pedagogy is particularly ‘hard to know’ and pedagogic content knowledge and pedagogic culture are underexplored or underdeveloped
Is the Association Between Education and Fertility Postponement Causal? The Role of Family Background Factors
Get PDFAbstract A large body of literature has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and age at first birth. However, this relationship may be partly spurious
because of family background factors that cannot be controlled for in most research designs. We investigate the extent to which education is causally related to later age at first birth in a large sample of female twins from the United Kingdom (N = 2,752). We present novel estimates using within–identical twin and biometric models. Our findings show that one year of additional schooling is associated with about one-half year later
age at first birth in ordinary least squares (OLS) models. This estimate reduced to only a 1.5-month later age at first birth for the within–identical twin model controlling for all shared family background factors (genetic and family environmental). Biometric analyses
reveal that it is mainly influences of the family environment—not genetic factors—that cause spurious associations between education and age at first birth. Last, using data from the Office for National Statistics, we demonstrate that only 1.9 months of the 2.74 years of fertility postponement for birth cohorts 1944–1967 could be attributed to educational expansion based on these estimates.We conclude that the rise in educational
attainment alone cannot explain differences in fertility timing between cohorts
Practice Policy Briefing: Participatory Action Research - Engaging marginalised communities in policy and practice
Get PDFThis briefing explains the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) with marginalised groups of people. In essence these were people who experience barriers in interacting with representatives of social policy and practice on a daily basis.
This briefing shares our experiences and gives practical examples of how we have used PAR with a group of migrant families who find themselves in a situation of having No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF).
For those who lack access to power, any opportunity to express their views and experiences is better than total silence and frustration. For example the Grenfell Tower responses demonstrate how a group of people reacts to not just the tragedy, but to hearing themselves and their views represented in public for the very first time.
Listening and including the voices of those affected is directly relevant for contentious but crucial policy areas. Immigration policy has in general become more restrictive, with the message of ‘control’ at the heart of public and policy debate. The case of families designated as NRPF indicates how controlled, restrictive and punitive immigration policy has become in its current practices. Where once it was the case that newly-arrived migrants could be denied benefits, even if it meant making British-born children destitute, a protracted slippery slope has led towards restricting benefits for other migrants, and beyond that to restricting access to public services such as health or education.
Most people without recourse to public funds are ethnic minorities. From the time when the SS Empire Windrush landed in 1948, bringing much-needed workers from the West Indies to the UK, race and immigration have been directly linked, though more recently the link has been less clear if not broken, particularly when contrasting ‘EU’ with ‘non-EU’ migrants. While non-EU migrants clearly have fewer protections and remain vulnerable to Britain’s more restrictive immigration policies, the rise in reported hate crime post-Brexit has shown how all people seen as ‘the other’ can be affected by a xenophobic narrative
Sexual diamorphism in the genetic influence on human childlessness
Get PDFPrevious research has found a genetic component of human reproduction and childlessness. Others have argued that the heritability of reproduction is counterintuitive due to a frequent misinterpretation that additive genetic variance in reproductive fitness should be close to zero. Yet it is plausible that different genetic loci operate in male and female fertility in the form of sexual dimorphism and that these genes are passed on to the next generation. This study examines the extent to which genetic factors influence childlessness and provides an empirical test of genetic sexual dimorphism. Data from the Swedish Twin Register (N=9942) is used to estimate a classical twin model, a genomic-relatedness-matrix restricted maximum likelihood (GREML) model on twins and estimates polygenic scores of age at first birth on childlessness. Results show that the variation in
individual differences in childlessness is explained by genetic differences for 47% in the twin model and 59% for women and 56% for men using the GREML model. Using a polygenic score (PGS) of age at first birth (AFB), the odds of remaining childless are around 1.25 higher for individuals with 1 SD higher score on the AFB PGS, but only for women. We find that different sets of genes influence childlessness in men and in women. These findings provide insight into why people remain childless and give evidence of genetic sexual dimorphism
Using Sensors to Study Home Activities
Get PDFUnderstanding home activities is important in social research to study aspects of home life, e.g., energy-related practices and assisted living arrangements. Common approaches to identifying which activities are being carried out in the home rely on self-reporting, either retrospectively (e.g., interviews, questionnaires, and surveys) or at the time of the activity (e.g., time use diaries). The use of digital sensors may provide an alternative means of observing activities in the home.
For example, temperature, humidity and light sensors can report on the physical environment where activities occur, while energy monitors can report information on the electrical devices that are used to assist the activities. One may then be able to infer from the sensor data which activities are taking place. However, it is first necessary to calibrate the sensor data by matching it to activities identified from self-reports. The calibration involves identifying the features in the sensor data that correlate best with the self-reported activities. This in turn requires a good measure of the agreement between the activities detected from sensor-generated data and those recorded in self-reported data.
To illustrate how this can be done, we conducted a trial in three single-occupancy households from which we collected data from a suite of sensors and from time use diaries completed by the occupants. For sensor-based activity recognition, we demonstrate the application of Hidden Markov Models with features extracted from mean-shift clustering and change points analysis. A correlation-based feature selection is also applied to reduce the computational cost. A method based on Levenshtein distance for measuring the agreement between the activities detected in the sensor data and that
reported by the participants is demonstrated. We then discuss how the features derived from sensor data can be used in activity recognition and how they relate to activities recorded in time use diaries
Scaling up qualitative data: with Professor Wendy Olsen
No full textProfessor Wendy Olsen, Professor of Socio-Economics, Manchester University, with Samantha Watson and John McLoughlin (with Dr Elena Zaitseva)
‘The need for a dispassionate approach to analysing mixed methods data led me to using NVIVO in combination with the British National Corpus. The latter covers varied uses of English, and we examine the prevalence of words in our own Qualitative Corpus versus the BNC. I create NVIVO nodes for each highly prevalent 'keyword' based on Touri and Koteyko (IJSRM, 18:6, 2015). Next I conduct discourse analysis by seeing how groups of these words are used together to achieve intended meanings. Using NVIVO matrix queries, I discover the extent of intertextuality for each pair of discourses. The method offers rigour, sophistication and transparency.
Crowd-annotation and LoD-based semantic indexing of content in multi-disciplinary web repositories to improve search results
Get PDFSearching for relevant information in multi-disciplinary web
repositories is becoming a topic of increasing interest among the
computer science research community. To date, methods and techniques to extract useful and relevant information from
online repositories of research data have largely been based on
static full text indexing which entails a ‘produce once and use
forever’ kind of strategy. That strategy is fast becoming
insufficient due to increasing data volume, concept
obsolescence, and complexity and heterogeneity of content types
in web repositories. We propose that by automatic semantic
annotation of content in web repositories (using Linked Open
Data or LoD sources) without
using domain-specific ontologies,
we can sustain the performance of searching by retrieving highly
relevant search results. Secondly, we claim that by expert
crowd-annotation of content on top of automatic semantic
annotation, we can enrich the semantic index over time to
augment the contextual value of content in web repositories so
that they remain findable despite changes in language,
terminology and scientific concepts. We deployed a custom-
built annotation, indexing and searching environment in a web
repository website that has been used by expert annotators to
annotate webpages using free text and vocabulary terms. We
present our findings based on the annotation and tagging data on
top of LoD-based annotations and the overall
modus operandi.
We also analyze and demonstrate that by adding expert
annotations to the existing semantic index, we can improve the
relationship between query and documents using Cosine
Similarity Measures (CSM)
The power of institutional ethnography: ruling relations in privatized services
No full textProfessor Orly Benjamin, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University speaks at the QUEST (Qualitative Expertise at Southampton) seminar on Ethnographic Approaches. www.quest.soton.ac.u