Using Social Research to Measure, Understand and Predict Behavioral Responses to Road Pricing in the UK

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aoife O'Grady ◽  
Anya Millington ◽  
Jo Bacon ◽  
Helen Bullock ◽  
Louise Taylor ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
Road Pricing ◽  
The Uk

ESRC Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 657-698
Author(s):  
Simeon J. Yates ◽  
Jordana Blejmar
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Levels Of Automation ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Technological World ◽  
Ways Of Being

Two workshops were part of the final steps in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) commissioned Ways of Being in a Digital Age project that is the basis for this Handbook. The ESRC project team coordinated one with the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (ESRC-DSTL) Workshop, “The automation of future roles”; and one with the US National Science Foundation (ESRC-NSF) Workshop, “Changing work, changing lives in the new technological world.” Both workshops sought to explore the key future social science research questions arising for ever greater levels of automation, use of artificial intelligence, and the augmentation of human activity. Participants represented a wide range of disciplinary, professional, government, and nonprofit expertise. This chapter summarizes the separate and then integrated results. First, it summarizes the central social and economic context, the method and project context, and some basic definitional issues. It then identifies 11 priority areas needing further research work that emerged from the intense interactions, discussions, debates, clustering analyses, and integration activities during and after the two workshops. Throughout, it summarizes how subcategories of issues within each cluster relate to central issues (e.g., from users to global to methods) and levels of impacts (from wider social to community and organizational to individual experiences and understandings). Subsections briefly describe each of these 11 areas and their cross-cutting issues and levels. Finally, it provides a detailed Appendix of all the areas, subareas, and their specific questions.

scholarly journals “A child with autism only has one childhood”: main themes and questions for research from the “Digital Bubbles” seminar series

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 113-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Parsons ◽  
Nicola Yuill ◽  
Mark Brosnan ◽  
Judith Good
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Responsible Innovation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Community Stakeholders ◽  
Autistic People ◽  
Seminar Series ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Main Ideas

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the main messages and key questions for further research arising from the seven-seminar series entitled, “Innovative technologies for autism: critical reflections on digital bubbles”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK. Design/methodology/approach A synthesis of the main ideas is presented, drawing on the presentations, discussions, participant feedback, and short papers from across the seminar series, which took place between November 2014-2016. Findings There were many positive examples where technologies were positioned and used as facilitative “bridges” between ideas, communities, understanding, and experiences. Researchers and community stakeholders also emphasised the importance of taking different perspectives and working in stronger partnerships with each other. Four overarching research questions were developed from these themes to provide a roadmap for future research, relating to: responsible innovation, technology-enabled social interaction, learning and pedagogy, and engagement. Originality/value The findings and methodologies produced by the Digital Bubbles seminar series, available on the project website (http://digitalbubbles.org.uk/) and in a series of short papers, provide a rich repository of state-of-the-art thinking in the field of autism and technology that is being utilised nationally and internationally in teaching and learning. This paper suggests some valuable future research directions and highlights the importance of establishing and maintaining multi-disciplinary research teams, with autistic people and their families at their core.

scholarly journals Users and Social Science Research: Policy, Problems and Possibilities

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Rappert
Keyword(s):  
Research Policy ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Public Funding ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
User Involvement ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Research Process ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Policy Problems

Recent times have seen a significant reorientation in public funding for academic research across many countries. Public bodies in the UK have been at the forefront of such activities, typically justified in terms of a need to meet the challenges of international competitiveness and improve quality of life. One set of mechanisms advanced for further achieving these goals is the incorporation of users’ needs into various aspects of the research process. This paper examines some of the consequences of greater user involvement in the UK Economic and Social Research Council by drawing on both empirical evidence and more speculative argumentation. In doing so it poses some of the dilemmas for conceptualizing proper user involvement.

scholarly journals Ethical Regulation and Visual Methods: Making Visual Research Impossible or Developing Good Practice?

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Wiles ◽  
Amanda Coffey ◽  
Judy Robison ◽  
Jon Prosser
Keyword(s):  
Detrimental Effect ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Ethical Review ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Visual Research ◽  
Ethical Approval ◽  
The Uk

The ethical regulation of social research in the UK has been steadily increasing over the last decade or so and comprises a form of audit to which all researchers in Higher Education are subject. Concerns have been raised by social researchers using visual methods that such ethical scrutiny and regulation will place severe limitations on visual research developments and practice. This paper draws on a qualitative study of social researchers using visual methods in the UK. The study explored their views, the challenges they face and the practices they adopt in relation to processes of ethical review. Researchers reflected on the variety of strategies they adopted for managing the ethical approval process in relation to visual research. For some this meant explicitly ‘making the case’ for undertaking visual research, notwithstanding the ethical challenges, while for others it involved ‘normalising’ visual methods in ways which delimited the possible ethical dilemmas of visual approaches. Researchers only rarely identified significant barriers to conducting visual research from ethical approval processes, though skilful negotiation and actively managing the system was often required. Nevertheless, the climate of increasing ethical regulation is identified as having a potential detrimental effect on visual research practice and development, in some instances leading to subtle but significant self-censorship in the dissemination of findings.

The ESRC Growing Older research programme, 1999–2004

2004 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 657-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN WALKER
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Active Ageing ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Full Capacity ◽  
The Uk

This article introduces the seven specially commissioned papers in this special issue of Ageing & Society from the projects funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Growing Older Programme. The ESRC Programme has been the largest single investment in social sciences research on ageing in the United Kingdom. It comprised 24 projects and, when operating at full capacity, 96 researchers. The article details the background to the Programme, its commissioning process, its eventual structure and how it operated. Then a selection is made of some of the ways in which the Programme has contributed new knowledge to social gerontology. No attempt is made to achieve comprehensive coverage of the Programme's topics but rather a selection is presented of the new insights generated under its six themes: defining and measuring quality of life, inequalities in quality of life, technology and the built environment, healthy and active ageing, family and support networks, and participation and activities in later life. The projects were spread unevenly across these themes but important new knowledge has been produced under each theme. The conclusion emphasises the scientific contribution of the Programme and especially the extent to which older people's own attitudes, aspirations and preferences have been at the forefront, but it questions whether or not policy makers and practitioners will use this major evidence base.

‘Who Wants to be a Social Engineer? A commentary on David Blunkett's Speech to the ESRC’

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hodgkinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Politics And Government ◽  
The Government ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Uk

This article is a response to a speech addressed to the Economic and Social Research Council which was made, in February this year, by the UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett. The speech was entitled ‘Influence or Irrelevance: can social science improve government?’ . Blunkett's programme for engaging social science in the policy process is far from unique and many of the arguments have been heard before. However, the curiosity of the speech lies in the fact that the conception of social science which Blunkett advocates mirrors the approach New Labour itself has to politics and government. This raises some rather interesting difficulties for social scientists. How do we engage in a debate about the role of social scientific research in the policy process when our own conception of the discipline may be radically at odds with that of the government? Furthermore, New Labour's particular conception of the relationship between social and policy-making means that we not only have to contest their notion of what it is we do, but also challenge their conception of the policy process. We cannot ignore this engagement, even if we wanted to. The challenge is to address it and to do so, moreover, in terms which Blunkett might understand. This article is an attempt to start this process.

scholarly journals Ecological orientations to sociolinguistic scale: Insights from study abroad experiences

2019 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khawla Badwan ◽  
James Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Moment Analysis ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Chinese Youth ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe sociolinguistics of globalisation, as an emerging paradigm, focuses on the impact of mobility on the linguistic capital of mobile individuals. To understand this, Blommaert advocates a scalar approach to language arguing that some people’s repertoires “will allow mobility while others will not” (2010. The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 23) and proposing high scale, low scale orderings. In this paper we introduce an ecological orientation to sociolinguistic scale that challenges the fixity of a high/low scale distinction by conceptually drawing on the notions of flat ontology (Marston et al. 2005. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4). 416–432) and exchange value (Heller. 2010. The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39. 101–114). We do this in relation to Study Abroad (SA) contexts, which offer spaces for investigating how mobility influences the exchange value of individuals’ linguistic repertoires. The study speaks to a broader project in social research which emphasises the agency, subjectivity and criticality of the individual and stresses the complex and rhizomatic nature of social interaction. Drawing on moment analysis (Li. 2011. Moment Analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43. 1222–1235), we examine the experiences of two study abroad students in the UK. These include tellings of critical and reflective moments through which we interpret their experience of how the interplay of language, place and ecology of interaction results in constant, dynamic changes in the exchange value of their English repertoires. Our contribution is to show how an ecological orientation and a flat, rather than stratified, ontology enables insights into language use and globalisation in a way that empowers multilingual, mobile individuals.

Models of the UK Economy and the Real Wage-Employment Debate

1985 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.J. Andrews ◽  
D.N.F. Bell ◽  
P.G. Fisher ◽  
K.F. Wallis ◽  
J.D. Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Real Wage ◽  
Business School ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Direct Reduction ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
The Real ◽  
Implicit Model ◽  
Wage Employment ◽  
Type Of Exercise ◽  
The Uk

This article is an example of the type of exercise that is made possible by the existence of the set of UK models at Warwick. Using three quarterly models, those of the London Business School (LBS), the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and Her Majesty's Treasury (HMT), and two annual models, those of the City University Business School (CUBS) and the Liverpool University Research Group in Macroeconomics (LPL), it considers the use, and possible abuse, of such models of the UK economy to illustrate the real wage—employment debate.In UK models real wages and employment are determined jointly and the article shows that the sign of the association between these two variables depends ore the nature of the shock which causes real wages to change. A common method of analysis is to perturb the endogenous real wage directly and although the results are quantitatively similar to those where the change to real wages results from a supply-side shock to the labour market, it is argued that such exercises are typically without foundation since no mechanism for achieving a direct reduction in real wages is put forward. Any implicit model which underpins the assumption of an exogenous shift in an endogenous variable needs to be stated clearly in order for the plausibility of the ‘intervention’ and resulting policy analysis to be assessed.

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