Official stats, and how to publish them - a post with Taylor Swift

I’ve previously discussed on here how I found the portrayal of one particular set of government statistics – the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation – problematic. To summarise that argument – reporting, based on government press releases, called certain neighbourhoods “the poorest”, even though IMD does not measure poverty, is a relative measure, and most problematically, this added to the stigma of the neighbourhoods. I covered some of the impact of this in one of the papers I’m most proud of. So when I was contacted by the statisticians working on SIMD16 to come and have a chat with them about how they could present it in a better way, I leapt at the opportunity. When their report came out I was extremely impressed. You can download it here – it’s quite a big PDF. The things I particularly like were: 

• The very clear statement of what SIMD measures and how it works, and can be used, on page two 
• The case studies that demonstrate that living in a neighbourhood ranked as deprived by SIMD isn’t awful, and that it can help target resources for great things to happen 
• The very clear “do not use SIMD for” list on page six 
• The fact that nowhere does it say which is the “most” or “least” deprived neighbourhood. 

The team that did SIMD were nominated for a UK Civil Service Award, which they won!

Here’s @PermSecScot congratulating member of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations team-winners of #csawards Use of Evidence award. Her pride is plain to see! pic.twitter.com/1uYo8ULhiB

— Suzannah Brecknell (@SuzannahCSW) November 23, 2017

I was incredibly pleased on their behalf, because they really deserve it.

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And, they’ve only gone and done it again – not won an award, but produced a report that is staggeringly good.

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It’s a report on a set of experimental statistics that have used new questions on material deprivation asked in the Scottish Household Survey to create a local poverty measure. Have a look at it here. It is soooooo good. 

Again, they’ve combined qualitative data with the presentation of the statistics to make the reality of lived experience come to life, but in a non-stigmatising way, for example on page six “Mary” describes how: 

“My kettle blew up, so I went and got a kettle off my catalogue. Cause I wouldn’t have been able to afford to just go and buy a kettle. And I didn’t want to say to anybody, ‘I can’t afford a kettle.’ Ken, people are coming in for a cup of tea and that, and ‘oh my kettle’s blew up, and I can’t afford another one’” 

An absolutely brilliant way to describe what material poverty means. 

And it gets better. There are bar charts throughout which show a percentage with confidence intervals. Rather than getting bogged down with complex descriptions of confidence intervals and statistical significance, the charts are simply labelled “The bars show measurement uncertainty. Where two bars overlap, there may not be a real difference between the two groups”. I mean!!!!!!

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AND AND AND it gets even better. Not only do they have CI’s clearly labelled, they then go onto interpret them for you. Each chart has a very clear description of “What the data says” and “What the data doesn’t say” to ensure that people don’t misunderstand the charts.

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And the data is really interesting. I just wish all official statistics documents were published this well, with this much thought put into their presentation.

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With thanks to the Taylor Swift Open Data Institute.

Unsolicited cock pics and some wanted attention

I’m currently doing a research project on LGBT+ experiences of homelessness and living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland – more details here. It has been funded by the British Academy and is quite small. I was aiming for 30 participants in total. I have found it really difficult to find participants, particularly young homeless people.

I did expect this to be the case – I’m working with a subset of a small(ish) population. Estimates are that a quarter of young people between 16-25 are homeless at some point, by the broadest definition (i.e. falling out with their parents and crashing on a mate’s couch). The Albert Kennedy Trust suggest a quarter of this quarter identified as LGBT+ (although there's quite a few problems with that). People often don’t realise they’ve been homeless, and might not be out, so might not define themselves within the target population. I figured using homelessness organisations would be a good gatekeeper organisations.

I contacted quite a few homelessness organisations and still struggled. So, I thought, where do gay people hang out and I might be able to recruit them? Grindr!

For those of you who don’t know, Grindr was one of the first dating apps. I believe it was actually invented by a straight guy who was impressed with how easily his gay brother managed to hook-up in the places he visited. You set yourself up a profile – picture optional, but it can’t be rude – and fill in other details (including your “tribe” [otter, twink, bear etc. I’ll leave you to Google, but don’t blame me]; your preferred sexual practices [it seems versatile bottom is where it’s at, again Google if you don’t know], as well as age and height and other usual stuff. It’s location based, so when you open the app you get the photos of people in a grid with distance increasing as you go down. There is also a “Fresh Faces” bar at the top which lists recent joiners. You don’t swipe people away like Tinder, so it’s more like a chatting app.

I hadn’t intended to use it for participant recruitment. In fact I’ve been in a long-term relationship for 11 years, long before Grindr had been invented, so I had never actually used it. I had used the precursor website Gaydar (I can almost hear the wistful sigh from gay men of a certain age when you mention that) so I sort of knew what it was like. Anyway, I had to apply for a change to my ethics permission (form here for info) from my University’s General University Ethics Panel to use it. Before I got to this stage, Mark Holton at Plymouth University mentioned I should also check the Grindr terms and conditions. These are quite explicit on not using it for marketing, or to recruit people actively, but I wasn’t going to be doing this – I couldn’t tell if anyone was suitable for my research from their profile, so this was more lurking and seeing who approached me.

When I submitted my ethics application it was the week after Stephen Port had been convicted for murdering four young men he had lured to his flat using Grindr. This meant the main focus of the application was actually the risk assessment, particularly since it was a straight male colleague who would be doing the interviews – making sure that people recruited this way were met in public places and that I’d talked to them briefly over the phone to check everything was ok. This was on top of the usual assurances, such as making sure the researcher checked in-and-out-of interviews by text message. I also had to ensure the participants were consenting properly with full information. I was also aware there was a reputational risk to the University – I could chat people up on the app as a representative of my University. Therefore I also set out that after people messaged me on the app, I would move the discussion to email as soon as possible and provide them with full participant information then. The usual participation and consent procedures then kicked-in.

So I set up my profile, example below:

I changed it from that to asking if people lived in particular neighbourhoods in Edinburgh and Glasgow depending on what I was up to and where I was. 

And, the burning question – how successful was it? Well, quite successful actually. I got 49 contacts by the time I wrote this blog post. Not all of them were interested in my research. More of that later. It took me a week to work out Grindr etiquette. I was expecting people to message me and say “I’d like to participate in your research.” However, you only ever start a Grindr conversation with “Hi”. My initial reply to these was an immediate “I’m only on here to recruit research participants”. After a couple of times it became apparent this was extremely rude, so it became a “Hi, are you interested in participating in my research?”

Quite a few of the contacts did fit the criteria, particularly people who had experienced homelessness, which was exactly the population I was looking for. The main problem was turning these into actual interviews. I found this paper about a sexual health project that had used Grindr to find people for a project about men-who-have-sex-with-men. They noted that they got a higher participation rate if they phoned people, not emailed them. I offered to phone or email in my message to people who said they would participate. They all wanted to be emailed. I would email. And then hear nothing. I have no idea why.

And yes, I did get people who just looked at my photo (I used a professional work photo where I do look quite cute) and messaged me for the very purposes Grindr was invented for. And so far, yes, this has also involved some extremely explicit messages. As a gay man, I was sort of expecting this to happen, but if you were to recreate this method of participant recruitment and went into this naïve and oblivious it would’ve come as a bit of a shock. A handful of other messages I got would’ve raised eyebrows out of the context, but with all of these I just ignored the messages, or if someone was a tad too persistent, I politely ended the conversation explaining I was only on the app to recruit research participants. 

So, is it worth the effort to find research participants? LGBT+ people are roughly three per cent of the population, so they are pretty hard to reach. I have exhausted every single recruitment technique, apart from flyering gay bars on a Friday night, with this project and have still really struggled. Unbelievably even snowball sampling only got me two other participants (and one of them was someone’s partner and another someone’s sibling). Riffing on Michael Rosen’s book Bear Hunt I’ve been joking that “I’m going on a gay hunt, got to catch a big one”* and it really has felt like that. I think, like the public health researchers, if you were looking for people who were dating, or after no-strings-fun with a 9 inch top, for your research population, then it is definitely the place to find them. Otherwise, I think my research was a little too leftfield for your average Grindr user. They’re on it for a quick shag, or to meet the love of their life, not to discuss their housing circumstances. 

I also swiftly realised there is ethnography to be done on how people present themselves on Grindr, and the rituals of introducing oneself on the app. A quick Google Scholar search identifies that this has been done. This raises the issue of how “public” social media is (as did this blog post). An ethics panel would probably not give you permission to recreate Laud Humphries’ famous Tearoom Trade participant observation of cottaging. Yet, we could probably do an ethnography of interactions in a gay bar with no issues, comparing, say, how gay men approach each other with how straight men approach women. People do not put themselves on Grindr to appear in a research project, and if I provided any more detail about some of the profiles I’d seen, people could feasibly identify them. A defence of being overly cautious on these issues is we live in a heterosexist society. As I am finding out in this project, we know next-to-bugger-all (pun intended) about the lives of LGBT+ people in very ordinary ways. As a social scientist, I believe the only way to do this is to do research, and this involves identifying people as LGBT+ and then asking them about stuff. 

Anyway, this is all I have to say on the topic so far. This will be written up as a proper methods paper, don’t fear! Oh, and as I tweeted a while back – an idea for a novel: the protagonist is one of the random people that appear in someone else’s online dating profile, and a North-By-Northwest style mistaken identity adventure then starts.

*knowledgeable readers will get the many-levels on which that joke works. 

This post is not about #IndyRef

#Yes Scotland in Leith pic.twitter.com/TWBg7PxUYG
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) September 8, 2014

Well, the above tweet has got 36 RTs at the time I write this, so it gives an impression of what the ferment of the #IndyRef debate on social media is like at the moment. Therefore, I'm not optimistic that a blog post about my recent paper will have much success. But here goes...

Most of my research and writing outputs to date have been on urban policy and urban regeneration with a distinct interpretive policy analysis approach (here, here and here) with some dabbling in discourse analysis (here and here) and most recently in my work on middle class community activism with Prof Annette Hastings (here, here and here). My most recent paper is dabbling into the world of urban sociology a bit more, published in Housing Studies.

In this post I want to shamelessly promote my writing by producing a synopsis of the paper, but also reflect a bit more on the process of peer review, as I am wont to do. The paper comes out of the AHRC Connected Communities project, led by Prof Chris Speed at Edinburgh Uni that was involved in called Ladders to the Cloud, along with RCAHMS and community partner organisations in Wester Hailes. You’ll have probably heard about this project before because of the totem pole that was partly a result of it.

The paper essentially takes further the analysis and argument made in blog posts for the social history blog From There to Here, here and here. If you look at the comments on the photos on the From There to Here Facebook page, I argue, you see residents and former residents of Wester Hailes collaboratively writing stories. There’s two main formats: “Do you remember this?”, “Yes, it was X in Y”; or “Is that you and X”, “Yes and that’s X we were doing Y”. These stories add a little more evidence as to how working class people understand their sense of home and place.

In the first version of the paper I focused on two aspects of sense of place in particular – firstly, coming out of the coproduced fieldwork and my research background, was how these stories resisted widespread stigma to Wester Hailes and reframed the neighbourhood in a positive light. Secondly, I drew on the concepts of selective and elective belonging to explore how committed these commenters were to their neighbourhood, or former neighbourhood.

The very positive, useful and extremely in-depth comments from the peer reviewers also allowed me to bring in a broader literature on working class sense of home from Chris Allen among others. This massively improved the paper, though due to work commitments at the time, it did delay the process of producing the revisions.

The process of peer review was very good indeed (although a little bit lengthy, but hey-ho). The original paper focused much more on the aspects of stigma, but also tried to bring in the broad literature on social capital, social class and community activism. I sort of knew it wasn’t working, but thought the paper was ready for peer review. The reviewers comments made me realise this part of the argument really wasn’t working and I just dropped it and focused on a much slimmer argument.  And luckily, mashing together the chopped stuff with some stuff from this paper that was rejected by a journal with some quite staggeringly bad comments, has left me with another paper ready(ish) to go to a community development journal.

However, what was most surprising was the paper went from “Reject and resubmit” to “accepted” following one set of revisions. I was absolutely gob-smacked. The last time this happened was with my first ever paper from my MSc dissertation. Anyway, I can’t complain as reading through the paper to correct my proofs, it isn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Also, unlike some reviewers (me not included) my reviewers focused on improving the broad sweep of the argument being made, rather than providing corrections line-by-line. As a result when I submitted corrections I’d almost run out of my 50 spaces manuscript central would allow me.

Anyway, I hope you do read the paper and enjoy it. To summarise the argument, it is:

• If we look at historic, naturally shared narratives of working class belonging then they are complex and nuanced with various degrees of selectiveness to their belonging; 
• Facebook sites can be a really good source for “natural” talk about neighbourhoods and belonging;
• Facebook is media and the content of it shapes responses - beware the algorithms.

Tada! As ever, copies available if you drop me an email.

Emerging thoughts on social networks, place and poverty

I’ve been very fortunate to have been awarded a research project by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as part of their anti-poverty strategy, to investigate the evidence around social networks and poverty. In our expression of interest we stated our aims as:

• Review recent international evidence (defined as from the last five years) on the links between social capital and place and household outcomes, particularly in deprived neighbourhoods;
• Review recent UK statistical and international evidence on the links between equalities characteristics, place and social capital to provide a more nuanced account of the intersection between social capital, neighbourhood and community, and other individual characteristics and their impact on life chances.
• Review recent evidence from grey literature and evaluations on the success of policy interventions in developing social capital to alleviate or tackle poverty;
• Review recent evidence on the capacity of online social networking to develop social capital and any specific barriers to digital inclusion people experiencing poverty may have.

I’ve been working on the first and third aims and just thought I’d write-out my ideas so far to clear my head. 

The first bullet point is the crux of the work for me as, being a planner, I’m approaching this from a spatial perspective. So I’m particularly interested as to whether there is a neighbourhood effect on social networks for people experiencing poverty. To explain, a neighbourhood effect, is the effect that living around other people the same, or different, has on an individual’s outcomes. To sum it up even more simply, it’s the theory that it is worse to be poor in a poor neighbourhood than in a mixed neighbourhood, because characteristics of that neighbourhood mean your experience of poverty will be worse, and your chances of leaving poverty will be lowered.

This is a very controversial view, especially because it toes the line on the questionable “cultures of poverty” and underclass arguments that emerged into UK policy discourses with Charles Murray’s work in the 1990s. Tom Slater has written a strident critique of the work here, highlighting how the focus should really be on why do people experiencing poverty ending living in deprived neighbourhoods that are ill-served by markets and public services. I and all the other neighbourhood effects scholars I know would broadly agree with this too, but there’s still something about the neighbourhood that has to be of interest. It’s very telling that the JRF themselves use this stock photo to represent poverty, even though everyone knows the majority of poor people don’t live in poor neighbourhoods.

Poverty?

This has become particularly clear with a literature search I’ve carried out. I was only focusing on literature in the last five years, but searched Web of Knowledge for combinations of “social capital”, “social networks”, “poverty” and “low income”. It was striking how the vast majority of the results focused on communities of propinquity – the neighbourhood or similar spatial units. The other striking thing was how the vast majority (I’d say 80%) of the studies focused on the links between social networks and poor health and wellbeing. These were discounted from our review as the outcome the studies tended to mention was health and wellbeing, not poverty or social networks (although, of course, causation is a complex web here).

So, what do I know now I’ve done quite a bit of reading? Well, I found George Galster’s seven possible pathways of neighbourhood effects to be useful to start as a theoretical framework and have narrowed this down to three possible pathways by which place, poverty and social networks might be linked:

•           Socialisation – norms and role models, essentially.
•           Threshold socialisation – that norms and thresholds have to reach a certain level to have an impact
•           Social networks – direct social contact may have an impact on opportunities to get on, or improve a neighbourhood.

I’ve included the first two, which are very closely linked, because they kept coming up in the research. It’s mainly because it’s very difficult to measure social networks in quantitative neighbourhood effects studies because of lack of data, so you end up researching social norms, really. But in a number of papers a link is made between social norms and sociability. For example, this interesting Dutch paper highlights how parents of children in deprived neighbourhoods cut their children off from local social networks to protect them from negative socialisation.

The socialisation stuff is also useful because of this bit of logic. The negative socialisation thesis, even though there is scant and mixed evidence for it, is used by policy-makers to justify “mixed communities” policies; basically knock down deprived neighbourhoods and introduce tenure mix. It makes your indicators look good, just ask Glasgow.

Now, the thing here is homophilly – not sure how you pronounce it, but it reads like a word meaning someone who really likes Philadelphia. Basically the theory that people like to be around, and socialise, with people like themselves. And it looks like it’s true. So no matter if you mix poor people with wealthier people, chances are they are not going to meet and talk to one another, except maybe at the school gate. There’s also the pragmatic reality of modern neighbourliness; as one respondent quoted in this research said:

“it has taken us two and a half years to get to know our neighbours . . . and we know our neighbour across the driveway very well because he is not very nice.”

So, even if we live around people and know them, it’s not as if we’ll necessarily get along anyway. Also coming up in the literature a lot is the fact that support networks in deprived neighbourhoods are vital for helping people get-by, particularly within kin. People will have smaller networks, but they will be able to rely on them less.

All-in-all, however, I’m already moving to a view that focusing on social networks within an anti-poverty strategy is not really worthwhile, as there’s plenty bigger fish to fry, particularly around maximising income. But we'll see. Still got a lot more to read...

‘Hard-to-Reach’ or ‘Easy-to-Ignore’?

In previous posts here and here I’ve discussed a rapid evidence review that myself and colleagues carried out on equalities and place-based policies in Scotland. Well the report has now been published. It’s been sent onto the Scottish Government and will also feed into the evidence being Local Government Committee in the Scottish Parliament inquiry into regeneration and economic development. Thanks to the good work of the EHRC it’s also been picked up by the media – the Herald, Scotsman and most amazingly the Scottish Sun!

A lot of what it discusses I’ve already talked about on here. To set the policy context for it, there seems to be a “return to place” in Scottish public with a new national regeneration strategy and other policy moves. Minor moral panics about things like the controversial TV show The Scheme (I’ve not watched it, so I’m leaving my views as “controversial”) have seemingly made neighbourhoods which, for most of the middle-classes in Scotland (including me) might as well be labelled “here be dragons”, seem like cauldrons of antisocial behaviour and poor-parenting that need curing through early-intervention projects. I’ll reiterate what I’ve said before on this blog, these neighbourhoods are like this because we put all our social housing in one place and there is a relationship between income and many of these social problems. We need to stop pathologising neighbourhoods.

Anyway, I’m in danger of digressing into a rant here, so back to what was originally on my mind. One thing that this review explicitly talks too, and I hope challenges, is the “community of place” and “community of interest” dichotomy. As is said quite clearly in the report – people who identify with an equalities group have to live somewhere. I’ve always found the idea that there are these two different communities unhelpful and quite distracting. And I think it makes for very bad community engagement. To reflect on your own experience for a moment, if you’re anything like me you probably identify with many communities and have social capital in these various communities. I want different representation in each one. So, in my work community I want the representation of my union. In relation to my sexual orientation, I want to know that the political bodies and institutions contain people who share my sexual orientation so might be able to raise issues that are pertinent to me. In relation to my place-based community, based on my research, I actually want either organisations that really do represent the diversity of my neighbourhood (and not just those who want to turn up and protect their own interests [£]) This is the sort of anti-majoritarian deep democracy theorised by Iris Marion Young in Inclusion and Democracy. If this is not possible, I want leaders who can stand up for those who are not represented.

It’s because of this that I think the “easy to ignore” point of the title of the review is really important in place-based policies. In Scotland it is easy to presume that the most deprived neighbourhoods are homogenous, working class and White. The picture is actually much more complex. At the most basic level a worryingly large proportion of those residents are Irish Catholic and they are also experiencing poverty. Also, a lot of the problems that are co-incident with poverty – ill health and disability, maternity and paternity (lone parenthood) – are also protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. Approaching them from an equalities perspective could, I believe, make place-based regeneration better, or at least improve its presentation (as I’m sure a lot of good work does take place). In sum a more embedded approach to equalities would stop the problematizing of groups and acknowledge the challenges they face – most obviously around disabled people who stop being a figure (of IB claimants or ESA claimants) you want to reduce and become a group who need help to access employment if they want to, or help to maximise their income if this is not possible.

This is an issue I discussed before, but I come back to it again, as I really do feel we need to acknowledge the intersectionality of place and identity when it comes to community and talking about “communities of place and interest” doesn’t help. Anyway, enough of these ramblings. Another thing I mentioned before was my very rapid review of the way the 32 Single Outcome Agreements of CPPs in Scotland treated equalities issues. Well, that’s available here.

Social media and social research: My first foray

At the moment I have some time to spend on the fascinating AHRC Connected Communities project Ladders to the Cloud, helping to better understand the Facebook page From There to Here… and help the community organisations involved in it turn it into something, well, more. For such a social media addict (my Twitter follower count is now up to giddy heights of four figures) this is my first foray into social media research.

Back in July I was given the login details for the Facebook page and so, for the first time in my life, I got to see the back-end of a Facebook page (rather than a user profile). Because these are essentially the money-making end of Facebook they provide you with “Facebook Insights” which give you age, gender and location information for people who look at your page, comment on your page and the “viral reach” – that is the number of friend’s feeds your posts appear on after someone has commented on them. It’s great for a project like this; with the handy knowledge that the research suggests very few people lie about biographic details on Facebook profiles, the site is essentially doing half of the social science work for you. Which reminds me, this book, which I'm told makes a similar point about the Tesco clubcard data, is on my to-read list for the nearly ending summer.

So, what did I learn from all this data? Firstly, it’s a bit difficult to download what you want. I ended up having to do lots of screen grabs, print out the images, and the then input the data back into an Excel spreadsheet. This done I learnt something very interesting. In March this year a big shift occurred, which is continuing, which has meant the biggest group of people heavily engaging with the site (essentially commenting on the images) is women between the ages of 25 and 44. Before then, the gender split was even and quite a few younger and older people were also commenting.

The next question is, well, there might just be a lot more Facebook users of that demographic in Edinburgh and the UK. Here my next trick came in handy. If you have a Facebook page you can pay to advertise it. If you click on the buy an advert section you have a form where you can target who you want to see your advert. As you close in on your ideal target market a counter on the right hand side changes to tell you how many people that is. So, there are around 38,000,000 Facebook subscribers in the UK and about 8,000,000 of them (21 per cent) are aged 25-34. Of this 359,000 of them live in Edinburgh (about two thirds of the city’s population) and 100,700 of them are aged 25-34 (around 28 per cent).  From all this, I know that Edinburgh has an oddly young profile of Facebook users, with these 25-34 year olds being the biggest group, whereas across the UK it’s 35-44 year olds who are the biggest group.

As a result I would expect more users at this age, but we’re getting a lot more – we’re getting 10 per cent more of these age groups then we’d expect if they were representative of the population of UK Facebook users. And 60 per cent of them are women. Why? I suspect this is just being driven by the content – these are photos of Wester Hailes in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s and the memories being discussed, such as this fantastic exchange of people working out who lived where, are of people of my age remembering growing up in the neighbourhood.

The trouble with all this, is that when I put out a (very successful) call on Twitter for info on social media use, the journals I was pointed too, like the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, predominantly report on studies done on college attending young people. This is partly because Facebook was at first limited to this group; partly because they are early adopters to new social media; partly due to a social-psychology research interest in this period as one of emerging adulthood; and finally just due to the publication lag - most of these studies were done in 2006-7 (and thus I've learnt about a lot of long lost social media sites! Bebo anyone?). So it’s difficult to find studies that might help explain these trends and put them into some sort of broader context. Although, I imagine if I can get a paper off swiftly I can hit a zeitgeist wave of research on other users of Facebook.

Finally, one last little thing, which I need to be very careful about how I write because I might end up getting sued by Facebook. When I was first getting the advertising data on the number of people in each age group I did not check a little box saying “exact age matches only” (or similar). So, I got the numbers for each of the pre-defined age groups and then as a double check got Excel to work out the total population to compare with Facebook’s total number of UK users. Miraculously the number of Facebook users in the UK had almost doubled, and a vast number of these people turned up in the 25-44 age group that marketers most want to target.

And in actual fact, to be precise, at the moment I am stuffing my face with sea salt and balsamic vinegar Kettle Chips dipped in humous. You should try it, it’s very tasty.

Thoughts on long hours...

Ironically, I've not had time to write this post, although I've been thinking about it a lot.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life balance recently and ended up having some interesting conversations about it. It’s the perennial problem in academia – if you ask an academic “how’s work?” the answer will always be “oh, busy”. One of the most dispiriting things about the recent UCU Work to Rule was the comments from academics glad to have their lives back. A Twitter “friend” recently asked his academic followers if we managed to keep a work-life balance. I was the only one out of eleven replies who said “yes”.

It’s been on my mind because this semester, as well as a heavy(ish) teaching load and PGCap assignments, I’ve won a research award to write a rapid evidence review. It’s all a bit much. With an assignment handed in at the start of the month and a two-week turnaround standard on marking I had to announce to my partner on Monday evening that this week I would be working some evenings and at the weekend to plough through my work and I hoped he wouldn’t mind. As it stands, I’ve managed to work efficiently enough that I’ve not worked too much outside my normal hours. And that’s the thing with me, so far, I’ve kept normal hours generally. I usually get out to campus for 9:00am and the latest I’ll work is 6:00pm. I try to get away from my desk for lunch to stop me going barmy and I very rarely work at weekends. I specifically don’t have my smartphone set up to automatically receive work emails because I want to keep that separate.

Yet on Twitter, while I sit and make sarcastic comments about Take Me Out on a Saturday evening after a nice dinner at a normal time, fellow academics are commenting on how they’re just sitting down after coming home from the office to finish that article off. Or on a week night at 9:00 pm people will be tweeting at how they’re just leaving the office. The THE recently ran a story highlighting how academics top the league for offering unpaid overtime.

When I read these tweets and other comments about hours worked sometimes I feel guilty. I feel I should be working that hard. But in the above mentioned Twitter conversation the response from someone else was “good on you”, and generally when I mention that I do this to other academics they are also supportive. My main motivation is that my “life” matters to me a great deal. I love my partner and my family and friends (my mum, for info [Lesley, not the homeless 16-year old]). The fact that my job takes up so much of my time  already and doesn’t pay enough to afford a train fare (although I think you need a bankers’ salary to manage that) means I don’t see family and friends as much as I’d like to. If I saw them even less through working hard I’d be very upset indeed. In one of my many chats recently about this subject, I discovered that a colleague who sends me emails at 9:00pm who I suspected was a bit of a workaholic, actually just works better at night. Which is rather nice.

So how has academia ended up like this? There is, obviously, an international culture that you must work very long hours and do everything fantastically well. In this way you will become a professor and change the world. The systems of personal development and review that most Universities now have, supported by the tools of governance like REF support this yet further. On my PGCap course there has been squeals from students that the time taken to learn how to make teaching better and more productive is taking time out of preparing REF-suitable publications. In my experience this manifests itself differently in different disciplines. In human geography it seems you have to be a full time left-wing activist, sleeping in an Occupy movement tent before dashing off to deliver inspiring lectures and subverting the institutions at University Committees. In the natural sciences you have to network-network-network; with government at endless meetings; with business leaders at networking breakfasts; with other scientists from around the world; while delivering inspiring lectures and bringing in billions of research grant income and developing a spin-out company. What I really hate is when this is then supported by almost macho bragging about this: the resigned comment at a conference “oh I worked until 3:00 am on Sunday morning to complete the paper and finish my research grant application”; “well I stayed up all weekend and completed a book, submitted two grant applications and had 48 hours of amazing sex with my beautiful wife”…

How can we change this? One thing I’ve certainly noticed helps resilience is the department you are in. My School is very good academically, but I do not feel there is a long hours culture. At all. I know some staff do work very long hours, but they do not brag about it, or comment about it with a sense of shame. At a recent job interview the fact the applicant commented on the very long hours they worked was seen as a negative thing. This helps me build my own resolve.

The other thing I have to do is just accept I won’t be an amazing academic. I’ll set myself modest PDR targets, I might get promoted at some point, but I’m not particularly bothered if I don’t. And this is something I’m learning that I’ll have to accept if this is my choice. What actually saddens me most about this is, to be modest, I think I’m quite a good scholar, and therefore it’s not me who will miss out on this, but academia. The long hours culture means I won’t shine as brightly as I might because everyone around me will be working 70 hour weeks and I’ll be watching Take Me Out.

Middle class places, normal places?

We're coming to the end of our AHRC Connected Communities research on middle class engagement with public services now and it's proved very interesting. In line with the realist synthesis methodology we've employed we have four mid-range theories which explain quite a lot of how the middle classes might be able to capture a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the public services.

We've workshopped the findings at my old department in Glasgow and will be presenting them at the Urban Geography Research Group conference at University of Edinburgh on 10/11 of November. We'll also be presenting a seminar at Heriot-Watt on 16 November (details to follow). Finally, I've been invited to talk about middle class places to the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (I think that's what they're called these days...) next Friday. Which is what this post is about.

My doctoral research focused on "so-called deprived neighbourhoods" and a great deal of my critique of regeneration policy stemmed from the way so much of the problem is the social construction of deprived neighbourhoods as a "problem". I've got an article(£) in Housing Theory and Society about how, over nearly 40 years of regeneration policy in Scotland, policy documents still stigmatised deprived neighbourhoods and all that changed was the terminology used. All of it was still pretty negative. One of my research findings was also how residents of "so-called deprived neighbourhoods" felt this stigma on a day-to-day basis in terms of feeling looked down upon and treated differently, especially by service providers like the local authority (some of the comments I overheard from officers while I was waiting to go to interview participants certainly showed how widespread this problem is).

I think indices of deprivation are really useful in targeting resources at those neighbourhoods that need them most (see the nifty new ONS Atlas of Deprivation) but every time an index is published there's the endless discussion in the press about the "poorest" neighbourhood and the "wealthiest" (the latter ignores that it's an index of deprivation, so it's not the wealthiest, but the least-deprived). This reinforces this stigma and also completely ignores that the fact of very wealthy and very deprived neighbourhoods existing is linked and also ignores the majority of neighbourhoods in the middle.

Towards the end of my doctoral research, and even more now I've completed this review, I'm much more interested in what makes perfectly dull neighbourhoods, those suburbs we all hate, so perfectly, mind-numbingly normal. I suspect that many private organisations like Tesco, the credit reference agencies and tools like the ACORN Classification can tell us more about these neighbourhoods than a lot of social science research because these neighbourhoods matter to these organisations as customers. What I'm getting from the review we've done of middle classes and the public services is the hard work carried out on a regular basis by people in normal neighbourhoods to keep them perfectly normal. This extends from joining formal groups like the Parish Council or PTA to activities in co-production like attending parents evenings as an active parent or being an active patient in interactions with health care practitioners. A lot of policy targeted at deprived neighbourhoods suggests they need community development because they lack this sort of activity, but there was not a body of evidence to support this.

More worrying, however, if that the broader context of public service delivery supports this sort of activity, specifically from middle class people with their cultural capital. Therefore, if you did increase participation from deprived neighbourhoods to be on a par with affluent neighbourhoods they'd be struggling between two competing tides: the greater severity and range of problems to be dealt with in their neighbourhood and their middle class neighbours are more likely to get a positive outcome from service providers.

Even more worrying is how this is treated as the status-quo. The usual reaction when I say "I'm researching whether the middle class complain more and get more" the reaction is a laugh - we all know this to be true, so why bother researching it. There's nothing we can do about it. Well actually, we don't really know it to be true and if we do know more about it maybe we can do something about it? But, as a middle-class academic, living a comfortable life supported quite remarkably by the welfare state, do I really care? 

And if you want my article, drop me an email and I'll send you a copy. Details here.

An hexperiment....

Hello folks.This is an experiment. Basically, I'm going to post a bit of an ESRC research proposal I'm working on on this blog and I want your comments. Please comment. Pretty please. Pretty please with cherries on top. The initial idea was to actually "crowd source" my "Case for Support" - this is the most important bit where you outline what you're going to do. However, I've personally come across cases where people have just completely stolen research ideas. So, as a bit of a cynic, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to post my "Pathways to Impact" statement. I'm presuming the UK research councils will now get sick of seeing this copied and pasted into research proposals. Or I humour myself, anyway....

In these hellish days of further education we now have to think about what "impact" our research will have. This has caused quite a bit of hoo-ha as the argument that "Einstein didn't have social and economic impact" keeps cropping up. I'm not sure what I think about the whole debate. However, I do think it is quite important in the social sciences because I just think research should make a difference, or want to make a difference, particularly when it's policy research like mine. It's me political mission.

Anyway, as part of the impact agenda, we have to produce this "Pathways to Impact" statement. And I want your comments on it. I want you to check whether it makes sense, spellink and grandma, whether you think the impact is achievable, whether it's "good" impact. So I want "lay" and professional (from other academics) views, please. Pretty please etc. Unfortunately, I can't reveal too much about the rest of the research proposal, but if you look at my other posts you'll probably be able to work out what it might be about:

"As policy analysis this research aims to have impact through increasing the effectiveness of public services. The proposed routes to impact are both instrumental and conceptual, aiming to develop a network of interested public sector policy-makers and developing an ongoing dialogue. This will be part of the researcher development for the PI, producing a partnership with policymakers.

In instrumental terms, the research is directly aligned to the most immediate concerns of policymakers. In the discourse of the “Big Society” at Westminster and in the policy agendas of the devolved administrations and local government, policymakers are increasingly interested in involving citizens in policy delivery through co-production. By focusing on those immediate interactions that can then lead onto service provision and expenditure, this research will unpack consumer relations with local authorities. Specifically, the research questions aim to:
• Provide new research knowledge to understand these interactions, how they are managed and their links to service delivery;
• Provide analysis of how the spatial pattern of interactions may be linked to quality of life and social cohesion within local authority areas;
• Provide tools for local authorities to understand and change their systems to handle these interactions more effectively.

At a conceptual level the research moves policy analysis from a focus on formal arenas for governance and participation – such as local partnerships or committees – to a focus on the everyday interactions of being a citizen. This will immediately fill a research gap between the literature on citizen participation and that on street level bureaucrats. The knowledge produced will enable local authorities to better understand who participates in the production of the local state and why.

Key stakeholders who will be interested in the research processes and findings are: policy-makers within local government – both those who manage and develop customer-focused “front-line” roles and those involved with wider citizen participation; policy-makers in central government focused on working in collaboration with local government in improving the delivery and efficiency of local services; and increasingly third-sector providers who will be entering the market to deliver local services. Initial contact has been made with a Scottish local authority suggesting there is strong interest in this research and a willingness to develop an ongoing partnership.

Being embedded in the policy-making environment through ethnographic research will allow networks with key stakeholders to develop. These will be complemented through forming a virtual sounding board of policymakers to comment on emerging findings and advise on how impact can be enhanced. Accessing communities of practice through the Local Government Improvement and Development Agency and the Improvement Service, in Scotland, will also widen the instrumental impact of the research.

The Institutes of Building and Urban Design and Housing, Urban and Real Estate Research at the School of the Built Environment have existing partnerships with government and industry. Through the research these networks and the knowledge gained from colleagues in their work will be accessed to ensure thoughtful and useful impact. In their research career so far, the PI has developed a public face and been keen to engage communities and policy-makers through direct interaction and developing research proposals, and indirectly through social media. This research project will be able to take advantage of these existing networks – indeed this Pathways to Impact statement was published on a blog to allow this community to comment on the quality and feasibility of the proposed impact."

So there goes guys, get commenting. Please?

Edit: appreciating the comments guys (and noticed quite a few people have favourited the tweet with the link). Just to clarify, there's no rush. I'm off on my hols next week, so was going to come back to this when I get back mid-August.