The Blog at Quants Corner

Prof Jackie Carter This blog post follows on from Dr Eric Harrison’s, posted here on Oct 21 st . Like him I have been reflecting a lot about developing analytical and research skills as part of the undergraduate social science curriculum, in my case at the University of Manchester. My reflections have extended to thinking about what evidence employers want to see in those who graduate from social science degrees and apply for a career in applied social research, or career choices that require them to be competent in using and analysing quantitative data.  I have a book coming out in April next year, entitled ‘Work placements, Internships and Applied Social Research’ in which I devote two chapters to discussing skills. I deal both with analytical and research skills, and professional skills. In each chapter I present a framework on how you can ‘baseline’ (record where you are starting from) your skills, and then I provide worksheets to show you how you can develop and grow your skil...

Tamanna Rashid Immigration has been at the forefront of public and political debate in the UK as recent net migration to major international destinations reaches unprecedented levels. Yet hostility towards immigrants has historically featured in British public consciousness, shaping racial tensions that preexist in the UK today. This research highlights the dominance of immigration as a problem reinforced by British political elites and media. It investigates public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants during a period of increasing public interest. Using the latest round from the European Social Survey (ESS), it examines immigration attitudes in the UK context while disaggregating immigration attitudes contingent to the racial profile of immigrants; this approach has allowed comparisons between how white and non-white immigrants are received by host countries. Secondary analysis on data from the 2014 round of ESS including over 2000 UK respondents shows that optimists outnumber...

Dr Matt Barnes The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has acknowledged the ‘vital contribution’ that public sector workers have made during the coronavirus pandemic and awarded above-inflation pay rises for almost 900,000 of them, including teachers, doctors and police officers.  Our new research suggests key workers do face lower pay than the average worker. And many of them also suffer from lower job quality, particularly in terms of the amount and timing of hours worked.  To analyse this, we used data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to produce a dataset of 25,000 people working in key worker jobs. We compared salaries alongside individual job quality indicators of each key worker profession.  Indicators of job quality* included whether workers are permanent members of staff, on zero hour contracts, work weekends or anti-social hours, part of a trade union, how often they fall ill at work and whether they have been offered any training in the previous three months.  This...

Dr Eric Harrison As the new academic year has started in blended, or in places entirely online, format, I’ve been more pre-occupied than usual by the ‘skills’ development of first year students. Most social science departments either offer dedicated modules in academic skills, incorporate them into other introductory modules, and/or direct students to useful materials made available centrally by the institution’s educational developers. I recently did a search through the main skills textbooks and I noticed that their content is still hugely skewed towards working with words. There are exceptions which have a chapter or two on numeracy (what we might now call ‘data literacy’) but overall, they’re dominated by the three ‘Rs’ of academic life: reading, writing, and referencing.  From a quants perspective this makes me a bit uneasy, because while we’re teaching students the importance of arguments and evidence in social science, we’re only offering half the tools needed to evaluate th...

Thanks for dropping by. We're a group of colleagues working at the Q-Step Centre in the Department of Sociology  at City, University of London. We've set up this space as a home for interesting resources using quantitative data in the social sciences and in the public sphere. You might be here because you're one of our undergraduate students; you might be one of our former students now working in a data environment; you might be a student or colleague from another Q-Step  Centre. Or none of the above. Regardless, we hope you'll find it useful. There's still some work to do behind the scenes but we're hoping to roll this out over the summer and be ready for the new academic term. Watch this space!