CCSR Seminars February - May 2004

Throughout the term, CCSR has a regular seminar series. Seminars are held from 4pm-5.30pm in the Studio, on the first floor of the Old Wing of the Dover Street building (the first seminar will be held in room NG29 rather than the Studio). All are welcome - no is booking necessary. Queries to 0161-275-4721

Copies of the poster for printing are available as PDF and Word files.

• Tuesday February 10th - Room NG29
  Methodological challenges for the 21st century
  Angela Dale, CCSR
  This presentation will seek to initiate a discussion over some of the key methodological issues which social science research confronts. These include approaches to establishing causality particularly with complex interactions; the role of multi-disciplinarity and its challenges; the scope for integrated methods as opposed to mixed methods. The key question underlying the presentation will be how we judge fitness for purpose or when are methods good enough? More questions will be raised than answers provided.
  
  
• Tuesday February 17th - Studio, 1st floor
  Solutions to confidentiality in the 2001 Census Samples of Anonymous Records
  Sam Smith, CCSR -- Powerpoint slides
  There were significant hurdles in the production of SARs for 2001 posed by the requirement to ensure confidentiality. The SARs team provide details of the resolution of these problems. This includes analysis of 38,000 trivariate tables for Scotland due to different disclosure policies.
  
  
• Tuesday February 24th - Studio, 1st floor
  Seminar postponed
  
  This seminar will now take place on April 27th.
  
  
• Tuesday March 2nd - Studio, 1st floor
  Working longer, working smarter. The ageing labour force, flexible retirement transitions and the new employment reality
  Kerry Platman, Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ageing
  The European workforce is ageing yet working lives have become increasingly compressed. Meanwhile, there has been a gradual erosion of standard working-time arrangements and a rise in .atypical. forms of labour. Will the ageing labour force adopt later, more flexible transitions into retirement in the coming decades? This seminar examines the prospects of more choice and time sovereignty for Europe.s ageing workers.
  
  
• Tuesday March 9th - Studio, 1st floor
  Modelling of ranked party preference data: British Election Panel Study, 1997-2001
  Nick Shryane, CCSR
  The generalized linear, latent and mixed models framework (GLLAMM) is used here to model ranked political preference among the three major UK parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat), using data from the British Election Panel Study.
  
  
• Tuesday March 16th - Studio, 1st floor
  Local demographic rates from the 2001 census
  Ludi Simpson and Matt Bowen, CCSR -- Powerpoint slides
  For local rates of fertility, migration, economic activity and household formation even a full census has too few people to give reliable estimates for subgroups. Multilevel modelling is used to borrow strength from other similar areas. The census and our estimation methods and assumptions can be used for other purposes, as will be explained in detail.
  
  
• Tuesday March 23rd - Studio, 1st floor
  Evaluating low intensity interventions: persuading school children not to smoke
  Andrew Pickles, CCSR / Medical School
  This seminar will consider some of the methodological problems in the evaluation of a school based smoking prevention intervention. Problems include correction for cluster sampling, attrition of schools and pupils, and non-compliance - schools not doing what they were supposed to. We will compare selection, propensity score and marginal structural models.
  
  
• Tuesday April 27th- Studio, 1st floor
  Researching ethnic differences in health - finding the right data
  Mark Brown, CCSR -- Powerpoint slides
  This paper contrasts the qualities of two key sources of quantitative data for the study of ethnic differences in health: the 1999 Health Survey for England and the 2001 Census. It is argued that inadequate sample size is a far greater barrier to better measurement and understanding than the crudeness of variable definition.
  
  
• Tuesday May 4th - Studio, 1st floor
  The Employment Patterns of South Asian Women
  Aysha Ismail, CCSR
  The seminar explores the reasons for polarisation in female labour market participation amongst South Asian sub-groups in the UK. The high levels of Indian women in employment contrasts to the lower levels of employment amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, and some of the factors that are thought to contribute will be described.
  
  
• Tuesday May 18th - Studio, 1st floor
  Occupational segregation and Part-time employment in Britain and the United States: the benefits of a multi-group measure of segregation
  Jane Elliott, University of Liverpool
  This paper will demonstrate that Theil's entropy index of segregation (H) can take into account the dimension of full-time vs. part-time work in occupational segregation. The decomposition of Theil's H makes possible a more nuanced analysis of occupational segregation, and is applied to UK 1991 and US 1990 microdata to explore differences in the extent and role of part-time work.
  
  
• Tuesday May 25th - Studio, 1st floor
  Schedules of work and family life in Britain - towards a typology using qualitative data
  Collette Fagan, Sociology
  In this project we undertook semi-structured interviews with 140 parents (in practice mainly mothers) of young children in London and Manchester. We asked parents about their households' schedules of working-time, childcare and 'daily life', their housing and local neighbourhood facilities. I draw on this material to develop a typology of household schedules in the context of theoretical debates about changes in family life and recent government policy initiatives designed to promote 'work-life balance'.
  
  

Details, slides and papers from the Autumn 2003 series are still available.