Government Social Research
Communities, identities & crime - provides a critical exploration of the importance of social identities when considering crime, victimisation and criminal justice.
Gender and the politics of time - looks at how women's increased role in the labour market has combined with concerns about the damaging effects of long working hours to push time-related issues up the policy agenda in many Western nations.
The National Evaluation of Sure Start - pulls together, in a single volume, the results of the extensive National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS).
Policy reconsidered - identifies key topics within the policy arena and subjects them to sustained theoretical and practical appraisal.
Poverty, policy and the state- explores the changes to social security provision and coverage in the context of both sweeping economic and social reform and growing poverty and income inequality in the last twenty years in New Zealand.
City survivors - provides a unique insider view on the impact of neighbourhood conditions on family life and explores the prospects for families from the point of view of equality, integration, schools, work, community, regeneration and public services.
Assessing the use and impact of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders - provides one of the first assessments of the widely used ASBOs.
Zero tolerance policing - examines the key issues of what policing is about and who defines it by exploring the notion of zero tolerance and its application in different settings.
New issue of Evidence & Policy (Volume 3, Number 4) - Contents include:
New issue of Benefits: The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice (Volume 15, number 3) - Contents include
Contents include:
Mathematica semimonthly update
Examining the impact of EU enlargement and the introduction of the UK Citizenship test on provision of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in Scotland
ACAS publish:
A review of the economic impact of Employment Relations Services delivered by Acas
Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) publish:
Developing an index of labour market adaptability for the UK
Department for Transport publish Framework for evaluation of the 2003 Air Transport White Paper policies - evaluation framework providing a useful guide to future evaluators for conducting high level evaluations of the achievement of the Air Transport White Paper (ATWP) policies and the impact of the Air Transport White Paper on airport development as a whole; and proposals for assessing the impacts of specific Air Transport White Paper policies.
Framework for evaluation of the 2003 Air Transport White Paper policies
Research evidence on the effectiveness of self-care support - includes information, self-care support devices, self-care skills training and self-care support networks in the care of people with long-term health conditions, short-term ailments and among those taking initiatives to stay healthy.
Research evidence on the effectiveness of self care support
Measuring poverty in Britain as a multi-dimensional concept : 1991 to 2003 (Working paper, n° 2007/6). While poverty is widely accepted to be an inherently multi-dimensional concept, it has proved very difficult to develop measures that both capture this multi-dimensionality and facilitate comparison of trends over time. Structural Equation Modelling appears to offer a solution to this conundrum and is used to exploit the British Household Panel Study to create a multidimensional measure of poverty. The analysis reveals that the decline in poverty in Britain between 1991 and 2003 was driven by falls in material deprivation, but more especially by reduced financial stress particularly during the early 1990s. The limitations and potential of the new approach are critically discussed.
Measuring poverty in Britain as a multi-dimensional concept : 1991 to 2003
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Defra, together with the
Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, the Northern Ireland
Assembly, the Environment Agency and other potential partners across the
UK, are jointly considering the establishment of an independent, multidisciplinary
Research Centre on Sustainable Behaviours. Defra are seeking the views of
a wide range of stakeholders on the proposed plans for the Centre.
No firm decisions have been taken on the need for, or design of, such a
Centre, and consultees are invited to input on both of these key considerations,
as well as to suggest alternative approaches. If funding is agreed, the
final specification for the Centre will be informed by the outcome of this
consultation.
To contribute to the consultation, please complete the online questionnaire
or alternatively, please submit a written response to the questions posed
in the full consultation document to: Mr Gary Grubb, Research Directorate,
ESRC, Polaris House, North Star Avenue, Swindon, Wilts. SN2 1UJ. gary.grubb@esrc.ac.uk
At the end of the consultation period, copies of received responses may be made publicly available, either in full or in summary in a short report. If you do not consent to this, you must clearly request that your response be treated confidentially.
Full information from dedicated consultation website:
Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2006: public attitudes to homelessness: research findings - summary of main findings and implications from the homelessness module in the 2006 SSA module on public attitudes and perceptions towards people experiencing homelessness in Scotland.
Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2006: public attitudes to homelessness: research findings
The Scientist publishes Open Access 2.0: The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work by Joseph J. Esposito - the debate over open access to the scientific literature appears to be moving onto a new phase. Many continue to argue one side or the other of a binary choice: Either all research publishing should be open access, or only traditional publishing can maintain peer review and editorial integrity. Others, however, have moved beyond that false dichotomy, instead increasingly seeing various hybrid models emerging and new, often complex, business arrangements. Includes links to related articles:
The nautilus model of scientific publishing
Open Access 2.0: The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work
Contents include:
Evaluation of the Ticket to Work program: assessment of post-rollout implementation and early impacts." - the Ticket to Work (TTW) program was designed to promote employment by enhancing the market for services that help people receiving disability benefits to become economically self-sufficient. Early impacts suggest that TTW slightly increased beneficiary use of employment services in 2002, the first rollout year. However, the increase did not appear to produce a corresponding increase in beneficiary earnings or a reduction in benefit payments during the first two years. Analysis suggests that the program would have to induce much larger future shifts in beneficiary behavior in order to generate the envisioned level of exits from the program.
Evaluation of the Ticket to Work program (PDF)
Cash and counseling: improving the lives of Medicaid beneficiaries who need personal care or home- and community-based services - program gives consumers a monthly allowance that they may use to hire workers and to purchase care-related services and goods. This report summarizes findings from five years of research on how each of three demonstration states implemented its program, and on how the programs have affected consumers who participated, consumers’ paid and unpaid caregivers, and costs to Medicaid. The findings from the randomized trial study design show that the program had overwhelmingly positive effects on consumers of all ages and their caregivers. However, in each state, total Medicaid expenditures were higher under the program than what they would have been in its absence, for different reasons.
Cash and counseling (PDF)
Mathematica semimonthly update
National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) publish Practical Research for Education (Issue 38).
Contents include:
Practical Research for Education (Issue 38)
University of Cambridge Primary Review published three further interim reports:
Commissioned from academic specialists and grounded in some 240 sources of published evidence, both official and independent, the reports raise important questions about standards of pupil achievement in English primary schools over recent years, about how English primary pupils compare with those from other countries, and about the national and international tests on which evidence about standards has been based.
Primary Review: 3 interim reports
Home Office publish Prospective crime mapping in operational context: final report - summary of a project on short-term burglary prediction which aimed to understand the patterns of burglary across a range of geographical areas and to develop and test an emerging forecasting technique, prospective mapping, to help the police and their crime reduction partners to prevent and detect more crime.
Prospective crime mapping in operational context: final report (PDF format, 2.03 Mb)
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) publish Public attitudes and behaviours toward the environment - representative picture of what people in England think, and how they behave, across a range of issues relevant to the environment, including transport and recycling. The results were produced from data collected from a representative sample of 3,618 individuals in England during spring 2007. The results follow from previous Environmental surveys run by Defra and its predecessors in 1986, 1989, 1993, 1996-7 and 2001. The sample was similar in size to the 2001 survey. The survey was supplemented by a further omnibus survey of 1,618 individuals to allow additional questions to be asked. The data were collected using computer assisted interviews lasting on average 51 minutes. Where questions are comparable, time series are shown from the three most recent of these.
Public attitudes and behaviours toward the environment (HTML format)