Celebrating 30 years of groundbreaking social and economic research The Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex was founded in February 1989 with a grant of £7 million from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This pioneering research institute was the first interdisciplinary centre for social research in the UK, created to provide a home to a new household panel survey. Three decades later, we celebrate the significant achievements of a long line of researchers and collaborators from around the world who have worked with and for ISER on groundbreaking new research and scientifically important new approaches to methodology. In recognition of 30 years of innovative social science research, the University of Essex has been awarded the prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for ISER’s ‘authoritative social and economic research to inform the policies of governments for the improvements of people’s lives’.
“It is with great pleasure that the ESRC continues to work alongside ISER and I extend my best wishes to everyone involved with the Institute on their 30th anniversary. “ISER surveys such as Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey have provided extensive evidence and world-leading insights into how people’s lives are changing over time, helping to inform policy and practice in the UK and beyond. The ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at ISER was recently funded for a further five years and continues to be one of our longest-running investments, undertaking ambitious new research in an era of uncertainty and change.” Professor Jennifer Rubin, Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council, UK Research and Innovation
Innovations in panel studies Thirty years on and ISER’s groundbreaking panel studies, the British Household Panel Survey, which ran from 1991 to 2008, and its huge successor, Understanding Society – the UK Household Panel Study – which began in 2009, have collected vast amounts of data about the changing lives and lived experiences, finances, emotions, social and political views, family life, work patterns and health – including biological samples, from tens of thousands of people in the United Kingdom. In those 30 years we have followed so much ‘change’ through tracking the lives of the participants in these two large studies. Our data collection has followed them through tumultuous recessions and significant political change, through new diseases and health issues, changing structures in families, communities, neighbourhoods and nations, through technological revolutions that have changed how we learn, how we work and almost every aspect of daily living, and the widespread changes in social attitudes on issues such as equality and the environment. ISER’s survey experts are world-renowned and our expertise has helped with the
development of similar household panel surveys around the globe, advising governments in other countries how to collect data on the changing lives of their population. We have trained hundreds of world-class survey experts. Our anonymised data is protected and trusted at the highest levels, whilst universally accessible for analysis by other researchers, governments, public service providers, charities and industry to understand how society is changing and how people are affected by those changes. Our survey experts have pioneered new methods in collecting data. We are leading innovations in adopting new technologies, in embracing health and biological information and incorporating administrative data into analysis to give a rich and complex understanding of research questions. We are now helping to design the new Eurocohort study – the first Europe-wide project to track children and young people from birth to 25. Our expertise in longitudinal survey design and implementation has changed the way surveys are conducted, data are collected and evidence made available, for countries around the world.
“A shrewdly judged package of research. A panel of at least 12,000 people from 5,000 households will be interviewed over 10 years to provide much deeper information and explanation about people’s behaviours than can be gleaned from existing research such as the General Household Survey or the Family Expenditure Survey. It will discover whether there has been a long-term shift in the way people think. Are home-owners more costconscious about social provision than their council tenant neighbours? Are private sector workers more enterprising and risk-taking than those in the public sector? Do people who have private health insurance take more care of themselves?” Melanie Phillip, The Guardian, on the setting up of the British Household Panel Survey, 1989
Innovations in interdisciplinary research ISER is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to quantitative social science research. Our current team of researchers from 22 countries includes economists and epidemiologists, demographers and political scientists, biologists, statisticians and sociologists. Since 1989 ISER has been home to the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSoC), now one of the ESRC’s longest-running continuously-funded investments and a world leader in interdisciplinary research. MiSoC researchers collaborate with specialists from universities across the world to create an extraordinary team dedicated to using multi-disciplinary quantitative social science to provide evidence with which to address key societal challenges. MiSoC’s long-running themes are central to understanding social inequalities: how are resources such as income, health, and wellbeing distributed, and what are the processes by which these resources are allocated to individuals, groups, and social positions? Our 2019-2024 programme continues this tradition. We will address specific questions reflecting new challenges posed by the way that technological change is altering employers’ demand for skills, and how we can enhance young people’s acquisition of skills to promote social mobility and
cohesion. We will improve our understanding of why families are changing, and the implications of this for economic, health and gender inequalities. In our increasingly diverse societies, we will study the importance of intergenerational transmission and exchange, using new data sources that can track people across countries and link different generations of family members. Throughout, we will investigate how individuals and families are responding to these challenges, examine their impact on wellbeing and the intergenerational transmission of life chances, and assess implications for policy. We will also develop and use new statistical methods to provide credible scientific findings in our underpinning programme of methodological work; this will also form one of the pillars of the training and capacity-building activities we carry out for the UK social science community. For 30 years, MiSoC has been a flagship investment for UK social science with considerable international reach and practical impact. The 2019-24 phase of our research programme will keep MiSoC at the frontier of applied social science, with innovative primary data collection, and work on developing cutting-edge quantitative techniques, addressing new and important questions that animate the study of social inequalities.
Innovations in microsimulation ISER’s experts in microsimulation have changed the way politicians and policy analysts understand the potential implications of changes to tax and benefit policies in 48 countries around the world. With funding from the European Commission since 1996, the EUROMOD model was first developed for 15 EU countries and then extended over time to provide a testing ground for comparing the impact of tax and benefit policies for 28 countries in Europe, both within a country and in crosscountry comparisons. Using household income data from each individual country and then applying the tax and benefit rules, researchers can look at how this impacts on households and individuals, predicting changes that policy makers need to understand. The tool can test the effect of changes to the tax system within one country, compare hypothetical scenarios, and researchers can even ‘swap’ policies between countries to see if the family support policies in one country would make a difference to child poverty in a different country if applied there, for example. The tool has been hugely successful within Europe, used widely by the European Commission to analyse the budgets of each nation and to ‘nowcast’ poverty rates before official statistical information is collected and made available,
which can be much later. Individual governments have also used the tool to test out policy ideas, and new forms of the model have been developed based on ISER’s innovation, to test out policies in regional governments and for nations beyond Europe. In 2009 EUROMOD was used to form the basis of SAMOD, a model for South Africa and the first model outside of Europe. Since then it’s been used to build models for Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Macedonia, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Paraguay, Russia, Serbia, Tanzania, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam and Zambia. The global success of the Essex innovation in microsimulation cannot be underestimated. The tool is making a real difference to challenging poverty in 48 nations including developed economies and developing countries, praised and used by organisations such as UNICEF and the World Bank as well as government economists, campaigners and analysts. This year, through a new project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, ISER aims to democratise the process of policy evaluation in the UK by creating the first openly accessible model for testing policies across the devolved nations of the UK.
Innovations in biosocial scientific research ISER’s most recent pioneering work is incorporating the analysis of biological information collected alongside social and economic data in our large panel study, Understanding Society.
Understanding the complex interaction between people’s social and economic lives and their health across the life span will be vital for health planners and policy makers, seeking to improve the nation’s health.
This new scientific approach allows our experts in biological sciences to work closely with sociologists, economists, demographers and statisticians, to understand how our health impacts on our lives, and our lives impact on our health.
While much research has been produced in different disciplines to examine these issues, studies are often limited by their disciplinary base: social science research often treats health as a unitary concept while clinical and biomedical studies generally control for a single measure of social position.
We have been collecting biological information from a subset of the Understanding Society participants – measures such as height, weight, lung function and blood pressure alongside more complex information from blood samples such as DNA, hormone levels and disease indicators. This uniquely rich data set is opening up new possibilities for understanding how social and economic circumstances are affecting our health. New analysis using these data has shown a link between insecure rented housing and higher levels of stress hormones, the impact of poor air quality on the health of people living in poorer neighbourhoods, and the difference flexible working can make to the health of full-time working mothers.
Our pioneering work in biosocial scientific research brings together the richness of social science and health data, analysed by researchers with expertise across biomedical and social disciplines, to understand the complex processes that link together different aspects of people’s lives and health at various life stages. Such evidence will help to inform policies about how and when to intervene to improve population health and reduce health inequalities.
Innovations with impact ISER’s research has had considerable impact on policy-making and practice across three decades, including two groundbreaking new approaches to social science which have had unparalleled lasting impact. Measuring social class In 1994, the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, now part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), commissioned the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to undertake a review of government social classifications. This work was led by ISER’s Professor David Rose with Professor David Pevalin and Professor Karen O’Reilly. The National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) was constructed to measure the employment relations and conditions of occupations, and has become the Government’s official measure of social class. Since 2001, the NS-SEC has been available for use in all official statistics and surveys. More recently, as a result of an EU Sixth Framework Programme project co-ordinated by the Office of National Statistics, a similar classification to NS-SEC has been produced for comparative European research, the European SocioEconomic Classification.
Measuring poverty As a result of ISER’s research, a measure of persistent poverty was one of the four statutory measures of child poverty named in the Child Poverty Act 2010, against which future governments have to report progress. In 2011, Professor Stephen Jenkins published Changing Fortunes: Income Mobility and Poverty Dynamics in Britain, the culmination of a sustained body of research carried out in ISER over a period of many years. This work demonstrates the importance of taking a longitudinal view of poverty and inequality – looking at how individuals’ incomes change over time, and how these changes relate to changes in family structure, employment and the tax-benefit system. These methods have provided the template for the way in which poverty dynamics are summarised in the UK’s income statistics: the Low-income Dynamics supplements to the Households Below Average Income publication, a crucial source for policy-making, using data from our panel studies.
ISER at 30 a brilliant past and a bright future Our mission at Essex is to undertake research which has a real, significant impact on the world and improves people’s lives. ISER is a flagship research institute, which absolutely exemplifies this commitment and delivers authoritative data-driven research which changes perspectives, challenges accepted ideas and helps us understand crucial issues. Over the past three decades ISER has become the touchstone for policy makers and those seeking to influence public policy in the UK and across the globe. This is why I was so incredibly proud to see ISER’s work recognised with a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. This was a significant honour for the whole of our University – and a moment to reflect on everything ISER has achieved. The world-renowned social science research taking place at ISER continues to have a major impact on government policy both in the UK and beyond, while our insights into research methodology make us a world-leading centre for guidance, advice and best practice. ISER researchers have always pushed the boundaries, made connections across disciplines and innovated to increase the accuracy and relevance of their research.
This approach makes a significant impact on our University’s mission to deliver not only excellence in research, but excellence in education as well. ISER’s track record of producing exceptional postgraduate researchers is exemplary and it has a wider influence on the transformational education we aim to deliver. ISER’s expertise in quantitative social science makes a tremendous contribution to the research and educational environment for doctoral students and future researchers. Never has it been more important to have trustworthy centres of research excellence like ISER to explain how people really live their lives and how our society is changing. I am sure ISER will continue to evolve and change to meet the latest challenges while developing the next generation of social scientists who will once more push the boundaries of the discipline.
Professor Anthony Forster, Vice Chancellor, University of Essex
Our 30th anniversary is a great moment to pause to reflect on the many and significant achievements by our very talented team of researchers and staff, and to thank our two main funders, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the University of Essex, for three decades of continuous and steadfast support for our innovations and ideas. Since its inception in the late 1980s, the seed of an idea of our original Director, Professor David Rose and colleagues, has blossomed into a world-class institute, garnering millions of pounds of grants for a continually evolving and inventive programme of policy-relevant and eminently useful multi-disciplinary research. The awarding of the Queen’s Anniversary prize recognises the huge contribution of ISER’s research output over the last 30 years to the improvement of people’s lives, through the evidence we provide to governments. We are very grateful to all ISER’s past Directors, Professor David Rose (now Emeritus Professor at University of Essex), the late Professor Tony Coxon, Professor Jonathan Gershuny (now at the University of Oxford), Professor Stephen Jenkins (now at the London School of Economics), Professor Heather Laurie (recently retired from the University of Essex), Professor David Voas (now at UCL) and my immediate predecessor, Professor Nick Buck. We are all unquestionably indebted to our own teams of stellar senior researchers and collaborators, the many gifted students and young researchers who have grown and flourished at ISER, and our remarkable and dedicated professional services staff.
Our next ten years will be full of challenges – more grant applications, more research innovations, more technological changes – as we watch and analyse how our world is turning and society shifting. ISER, with such a strong history in rising to such challenges, will remain firmly committed to providing first class research evidence to those in power and to the public.
Professor Emily Grundy, Director of ISER, 2017 to present day
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