Programme for the 8th ESRC Research Methods Festival 2018
09:15 - 10:45
Tackling selection bias in sentencing data analysis
Convenors:
Dr Jose Pina-Sanchez (University of Leeds)
Dr Sara Geneletti (London School of Economics)
Analyses of judicial decisions tend to focus on the duration of custodial sentences. These types of sentences are however quite rare (8\% of the total in England and Wales), which generates a problem of selection bias. We suggest a new approach based on finite mixture modelling, Bayesian statistics and aggregated views from judges, capable of modelling simultaneously all types of sentences. Distributions of the relative severity of the four major sentence outcomes (fines, community orders, suspended sentences, and custody) are specified into the same mixture model, making the most of the information available in sentence data.
09:15 - 10:45
Innovations in measuring household finances: questionnaires and mobile apps
Convenor:
Professor Mike Brewer (University of Essex)
Developing feasible and efficient methods for collecting accurate information about household finances poses many challenges. Presentations in this session will report on 1) experiments with ways of improving the reporting of income in a survey questionnaire, by asking respondents to review and edit summaries of all income they reported in the survey, 2) experiments with ways of collecting data about the whole household budget constraint (income, spending and changes in assets and debts) in a single interview, and 3) a mobile app study, where respondents recorded purchases by taking pictures of shopping receipts.
09:15 - 10:45
Qualitative diary apps to collect multi-modal data
Convenors:
Dr Laura Radcliffe (University of Liverpool)
Ms Leighann Spencer (University of Liverpool)
This presentation will focus on the use of Qualitative Diary Apps to enable researchers in capturing rich, multi-modal, qualitative data. Qualitative diaries in all forms offer exciting opportunities to uncover and explore the meaningfulness of participants’ lives in everyday situations, reducing recall bias and enabling understanding of events from individual perspectives across time. As mobile technologies are now prevalent, there are calls from social scientists to draw on research methods that utilise this mobile culture to enable multi-modal data collection on the move. We explore the possibilities, challenges, and practicalities of using Qualitative Diary Apps for data collection.
09:15 - 10:45
Developing interactive tools for large-scale surveys
Convenor:
Dr Sarah Butt (City, University of London )
Social surveys still often rely on basic tools to manage and document key survey processes, resulting in wasted or duplicated effort, information being lost and inconsistencies occurring. This session showcases new online tools being developed and tested as part of the EU funded SERISS project (www.seriss.eu) to support key tasks in the survey lifecycle, including questionnaire design, fieldwork monitoring and survey management. The tools and available metadata will be of interest to primary data producers and secondary data users. Presentations discuss technical and methodological innovations of each tool as well as practical aspects of the tools’ implementation.
09:15 - 10:45
Computational social science
Convenors:
Professor Maria Fasli (University of Essex)
Ms Katie Metzler (SAGE Publishing)
This session will bring together computer and social scientists from the University of Essex to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing researchers applying methods from the fast-developing fields of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to social science problems. The promise of “big data”, along with the affordances of new technology and advances in computational methods have transformed fields such as biology and astronomy, but take up within the social sciences has been slower. This session will introduce examples of computational methods that have been applied in social science problems and discuss challenges and opportunities.
09:15 - 10:45
AI and Social Science
Convenor:
Professor Mark Elliot (University of Manchester)
This session will cover topics central to the development of AI and its relationship with the social sciences. We have 'What is?'-style talks on two key topics in AI - 'deep learning' and 'explainable AI' - sandwiched between deliberative talks on the relationship between AI and humans.
09:15 - 10:45
Advances in sociogenomics
Convenor:
Professor Melinda Mills (Oxford University)
The last decade has brought an explosion of data that contains both social and molecular genetic measures that demands innovative methodological approaches. This includes many key UK data sources such as Understanding Society, the 1958 Birth Cohort, UKBiobank and others. This session provides a series of short talks with an introduction, which focus on statistical properties and methods and new approaches to sociological topics.
10:45 - 11:15
BREAK
11:15 - 12:45
Tracing a smart city in the making
Convenor:
Dr Alan-Miguel Valdez (Research Associate, SCiM, The Open University)
Urban scholarship is increasingly paying attention to the ways in which cities are reconfigured by digital technologies. The growing number of smart city projects being deployed provide unprecedented opportunities for studying ‘actually existing smart cities’. SCiM-MK (http://www.scim-mk.org) is a social science research project focused on Milton Keynes, a ‘new town’ in England, as a smart city ‘in the making’. In this panel, we discuss methodological challenges faced by the SCiM project, and we also invite contributions from researchers that inspired us. Panelists will discuss their methodological practices for tracing the sites and situations in which smart cities are made.
11:15 - 12:45
Comics as a research method
Convenors:
Ms Lydia Wysocki (Newcastle University)
Dr Jorge Catala-Carrasco (Newcastle University)
Comics is a familiar medium of sequential and interdependent words and pictures, and an emergent research method. It has many manifestations (as graphic novels, cartoons, and other categorisations) and many possibilities, both in print and through newer online and digital technologies. We explore making comics and using existing comics at different stages of research, including: planning, data elicitation and collection, analysis, writing, and wider dissemination. Our approaches consider comics as a site of construction and interpretation. We show how comics have already furthered existing visual and multimodal methods, and suggest further possibilities for creative and participative approaches to research.
11:15 - 12:45
Using the StatJR software to automate quantitative research and teaching
Convenor:
Professor William Browne (University of Bristol)
In this session we describe the StatJR software package that was originally developed in research projects funded by NCRM. We will start by introducing the package explaining how it works and what it can do before looking at 3 topics that demonstrate StatJRs use for a diverse audience. First it’s use in making cutting edge models available to a wide audience, second it’s use in automating the research process for commonly used advanced statistical models and third the development through a British Academy funded project of interoperability with SPSS allowing automating the generation of teaching materials.
11:15 - 12:45
Show me the data: research reproducibility for qualitative methods
Convenors:
Ms Louise Corti (UK Data Archive, University of Essex)
Ms Maureen Haaker (UK Data Archive, University of Essex)
In quantitative methods, reproducibility is held as the gold standard for demonstrating research integrity. But, threats to scientific integrity, such as fabrication of data and results have led to some journals now requiring data, syntax and prior registration of hypotheses to be made available as part of the peer-review. While qualitative research reproducibility has been questioned in the past, it has been protected from the recent transparency agenda. But for how long? What if journals mandate the sharing of data and analysis for qualitative research? A panel of speakers will debate how such ‘reproducibility’ approaches and standards might look.
11:15 - 12:45
Applying a complexity perspective to the assessment of evidence
Convenor:
Professor Paul Montgomery (University of Birmingham)
Synthesising evidence is a rapidly advancing field. Policymakers are demanding more sophisticated approaches and we will report on new work in the field in two presentations. Firstly, the dominant imprint exerted by systematic reviews of effects makes it difficult to challenge their pervasive influence. In contrast, qualitative evidence synthesis (QES) should be sensitive to the epistemological assumptions that underpin primary qualitative research. The first presentation traces the contrasting contributions of these two influences throughout all stages of the systematic review process. Secondly, researchers conducting systematic reviews on complex interventions report difficulties in using GRADE, the leading tool for assessing such a body of evidence. The second presentation will report outcomes from a large ESRC project- GRADE-CI with results and guidance - applying a ‘complexity perspective’ in order to help these assessments. After, a discussion will consider the theoretical and practical issues with these new approaches since initiatives such as GRADE-CERQual and increasing interest in mixed-methods reviews suggest a potential rapprochement for the two paradigms.
11:15 - 12:45
New developments in qualitative evaluation research
Convenor:
Dr Flora Cornish (London School of Economics & Political Science)
Qualitative methods are recognised in health-related evaluation studies for their supportive role either in providing descriptive evidence about “people’s experiences” or in tailoring trial design to maximise chances of success. However, qualitative research has more fundamental and independent contributions to offer. This session’s speakers will explore ways in which qualitative inquiry expands the terrain of evaluation research, by generating innovative ideas, understanding the agency of subjective experiences, and considering how interventions operate at different ‘scales’. Quantitative evaluations' suggestions of certainty are alluring in a ‘post-truth’ era. This session showcases the necessity of the qualitative.
11:15 - 12:45
Somatics toolkit for ethnographers
Convenor:
Dr Eline Kieft (Coventry University)
This workshop presents our NCRM project ‘Research with A Twist: developing a somatics toolkit for ethnographers’. The toolkit addresses pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and post-fieldwork phases for PhD students in anthropology. Topics include bodily awareness when gathering and interpreting (fieldwork) data. Furthermore, the toolkit supports self-care during the research cycle, contributing to better mental health and wellbeing of the researcher. After a quick overview of the project, we will explore the potential of physical awareness in our roles as anthropologists in the field, concluding with time for reflection and feedback.
12:45 - 14:00
LUNCH
14:00 - 14:15
Prize Giving: Jon Rasbash and Poster Competition
14:15 - 15:30
NCRM annual lecture - Natural geographical experiments in economic inequality
Convenor:
Professor Danny Dorling (University of Oxford)
Since the 1970s affluent countries have diverged. Some have become more unequal, others have managed to maintain or improve on a high degree of social solidarity. In 2009 Wilkinson and Pickett published the first evidence of what this natural experiment revealed in their book ‘The Spirit Level’. Almost ten years later it now appears that there may be many other harmful effects of inequality, many not initially recognized. From climate change to stupidity, economic inequality may be more damaging than we first thought. However, the debate about correlation, causation and coincidence will also rage on, especially in more unequal countries.