Autumn 2008 Joint Seminar Series

Individual and Social Change and Methods of Measurement.

The Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR) and the Institute for Social Change (ISC) at Manchester University are hosting a joint seminar programme in 2008/9. Invited experts in quantitative methods and social statistics will explain their latest research on aspects of individual and social change and methods of measurement.

The joint seminar programme will be of interest to all members of CCSR and ISC as well as to many others in the University and outside. Seminars are held on Tuesdays from 4pm - 5.30pm on the second floor of the Arthur Lewis Building (2nd Floor - 2.16 Boardroom). Tea and coffee is available from 3.45pm.

All are welcome and no booking is necessary. Queries to 0161-275-4721. See www.ccsr.ac.uk/seminars/ for up to date details.

A poster showing all the seminars in this series is available as a PDF. CCSR also runs an informal lunchtime seminar series.

If you wish to receive email announcements of upcoming seminars, join our mailing list. Outlook, iCal or other calendaring users can have an automatic entry in their diary by subscribing to our feed of seminar dates

23rd September:
Means, Ends, and Process Benefits
Jay Gershuny, University of Oxford

In the 1960s and 1970s there developed strong opposition to using economic growth (i.e. GNP) as the key indicator of social and economic progress. Such opposition has recently experienced a resurgence, in a somewhat different guise, in the form of concern with happiness, "domain satisfaction" and the degree of enjoyment of activities (e.g. Layard, Oswald, Kahneman and Krueger). The GNP concept implies treating activities as either means or ends. Paid (and unpaid) work generates utility only indirectly via the control it affords over consumption, whereas leisure/consumption generates utility directly. But work might be a valued end in and of itself, while leisure might be purely a means of achieving a more distant object (e.g. the "dutiful" visiting of elderly relatives). And certainly different individuals might view the same activity differently, and any activity may be more or less enjoyable in itself.

I will discuss two essentially orthogonal approaches, contrasting "process benefits" (Juster & Stafford, 1986) — time-weighted measures of enjoyment of activities — with extended versions of GNP. The underlying message of this talk is that the relationship between two (or more) sorts of accounting may be understood within the context of a single representation of a society's time-budget. The most important point is that the different sorts of time-based accounts, with different temporal perspectives, actually or potentially yield conflicting messages. A change that has positive effects in one sort of account may yield negative effects in the other. Such conflicts are not appropriately resolved by ignoring one or other of the signals. The accounts are different, in principle equally valid, ways of evaluating a single socioeconomic circumstance. Time diary materials are an important resource for considering the potentially competing measures in a balanced manner.

30th September:
A Genetic Basis for Social Trust?
Patrick Sturgis, University of Southampton

7th October:
Family Disruption and Children's Educational Outcomes in Norway
Wendy Sigle Rushton, London School of Economics and Political Science

14th October:
Local Conflict and Community Development; Projects in Indonesia: Part of the Problem or Part of a Solution?

Michael Woolcock, University of Manchester

21st October:
Studying place effects on health by synthesising individual and area-level outcomes using a new class of multilevel models
Nicky Best, Imperial College London

28th October:
Religion in the past decades: Testing competing theories
Nan Dirk de Graaf, University of Oxford

4th November:
Social Change and Social Networks in Later Life: A Study of Three Urban Areas
Chris Phillipson, Keele University

11th November:
Social Class Variation in Risk: A Comparative Analysis of the Dynamics of Economic Vulnerability
Christopher T. Whelan, Economic & Social Research Institute, Dublin

18th November:
Social networks dynamics: methods, examples, and outlook.
Tom Snijders, Universities of Groningen & Oxford

25th November:
Inequality Among American Families With Children, 1975 to 2005
Bruce Western, Harvard University

2nd December:
The employment and earnings of migrants in Great Britain
Martyn Andrews, University of Manchester

9th December:
Do strong family ties inhibit trust?
John Ermisch, University of Essex

Details, slides and papers from the previous series' are still available: Spring 2008, Autumn 2007, Spring 2007, Autumn 2006, Spring 2006, Autumn 2005, Spring 2005, Autumn 2004, Spring 2004, Autumn 2003 or the current series.