CCSR Seminars

Throughout the term, CCSR has a regular seminar series. Seminars are held from 4pm - 5.30pm in the CCSR Seminar Room, 2nd floor, Crawford House, accessed through the central entrance on Booth Street East, off Oxford Road.

All are welcome and no booking is necessary. Queries to 0161-275-4721.

A poster showing all the seminars in this series is available as a Word file and PDF.

If you wish to receive email announcements of upcoming seminars, join our mailing list.

Tuesday 11 October
Competing for your local councillor’s attention: Geographical variations in representation for local authorities and wards in England
Paul Norman, CCSR Across political units the number of electors per representative should be as equal as possible; we examine variations in these ratios, focusing on whether differences relate to distributions of ethnic minority populations.
Slides

Tuesday 18 October
Bayes’ theorem, graphical models and statistical disclosure control
Duncan Smith, CCSR
An overview of the Bayesian approach to inference with specific reference to graphical models, and the application of Bayesian methods to statistical disclosure control problems.

Tuesday 25 October
Student mobilities, habitus and identities
Clare Holdsworth, Dept. of Geography, University of Liverpool
The seminar will present findings from a mixed-methods research project exploring HE students’ mobilities and experiences of university life.

Tuesday 1 November
The instability of divorce risk factors in the UK
Tak Wing Chan, Dept. of Sociology, University of Oxford
The effects on the divorce rate of educational attainment, premarital cohabitation, and spouse’s previous marital status have all undergone significant changes in the UK, and children are now associated with higher (rather than lower) risk of divorce.

Thursday 3rd November
Data access, confidentiality and disclosure control in Australia.
Bruce Fraser, Director of the Data Access and Confidentiality Methodology Unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics
A lunch time seminar about data access, confidentiality and disclosure control in Australia. They do things differently down under so it will be interesting to see what Bruce has to say

Tuesday 8 November
Ethnicity and postgraduate study in sociology, anthropology and politics: A look at the evidence
Paul Wakeling & Jerry Johnson, SoSS, University of Manchester
Whilst ethnic minorities are ‘over-represented’ at first degree level, does this remain true for postgraduates? What implications might there be for the social science profession?
Slides

Tuesday 15 November
The impact of residential segregation on employment amongst Britain’s ethno-religious minorities: A multi-level analysis
Nabil Khattab, Dept. of Sociology, University of Bristol
Using CAMS and multi-level analysis, we explore how residential segregation affects economic activity and unemployment amongst different ethno-religious minorities in Britain

Tuesday 22 November
Fertility regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Contraception is only half the story
Mark Brown, CCSR
A preoccupation with the contraceptive prevalence rate as the key indicator of a transition from natural to controlled fertility misses the complexity of reproductive strategies in contemporary Africa; the paper considers the implications for research and policy.

Tuesday 29 November
Losing support: The role of issues in party exit
Jane Green, Nuffield College, Oxford
This presentation challenges the assumptions that the supporters of a political party have incentives to pull their party towards their own ideological positions and offers an alternative issue theory of party loyalty and exit.

Tuesday 6 December
Combinatorial optimisation: A new approach to survey reweighting?
Paul Williamson, Dept. of Geography, University of Liverpool
Survey reweighting is widely used to address known or suspected 'shortcomings' in survey data, but these methods are not without problems. This talk will briefly review existing approaches to survey reweighting, highlight some of their shortcomings, and outline a potential new approach. The estimation of housing affordability is used as a case study to provide a testing ground for comparison of alternative methods.

Tuesday 13 December
Do good neighbours make active citizens? Civic participation in context in the UK
Charles Pattie, Dept. of Geography, University of Sheffield
Are people who live in civically active communities more likely to become active themselves as a result, or are these communities active because of the sorts of people who live within them?

Details, slides and papers from the previous series' are still available Spring 2005, Autumn 2004, Spring 2004, Autumn 2003.