Category Archives: Statistics in Society

NEW BOOK Data in Society: Challenging statistics in an age of globalisation (August 2019)

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Data in Society: Challenging statistics in an age of globalisation … editors Jeff Evans, Sally Ruane, and Humphrey Southall; Policy Press, 2019.

It is 20 years since the publication of the last Radical Statistics collection, Statistics in Society (1999), and even longer since Demystifying Social Statistics (1979). This third collection of chapters produced under the auspices of Radical Statistics will be published by Policy Press in August 2019.

The use of both ‘statistics’ and ‘data’ in the title is to capture the tension between two views of the materials, the methods and the professional and disciplinary basis of our work: the statistical data, statistical analysis,and the statistics and allied professions / disciplines, on the one hand; and ‘data’ (sometimes ‘big’), data analytics, and data scientists, on the other. The aims of the book include:

to explore ongoing developments in the uses of data and the role of statistics in today’s society, including the increasing diversity of data producers beyond the state, notably private corporations, especially those based on social media and new technologies;

to raise levels of critical understanding in terms of the role and significance of statistical data and statistical claims, and to invite a wider public of non-specialist readers, including third sector, professional and service user groups;

to consider how statistics are used in social discourse and debate, to advance interests and to achieve particular, often political, ends.

The audience for the book will include: teachers, researchers and students in applied statistics, and in research methods for a range of social science, health and business areas; those training or practising in areas such as social work, youth and community work, teaching and nursing;  community activists and others using statistics as a campaigning tool and wanting to critically understand their use by others; and, of course, members and allies of the Radical Statistics Group.

Most higher education and training courses for the groups above include an introduction to the use of statistics. The introduction of Q Step programmes to enhance the level of teaching of quantitative methods to social science undergraduates in UK Universities has led to an increased emphasis on quantitative material across the whole range of social sciences and related fields, in undergraduate and taught post-graduate programmes. A number of the chapters here include clear signposts to the date used in their analyses.

Throughout its gestation, the book has benefited from the support of Radical Statistics and its members. Early planning meetings and travel to face-to-face Editors’ meetings were supported by the Radical Statistics Troika. Throughout, appeals to members, allies, and the mailing list have elicited valuable help, including reviewing of chapters. We thank everyone who has supported the book’s development, and look forward to your participation in the arguments that we hope will be stimulated by the book.

The contents of the book are as follows.

Foreword Danny Dorling, and Preface the Editors

Introduction Humphrey Southall, Jeff Evans and Sally Ruane

Part 1: How Data are Changing Introduction: Humphrey Southall and Jeff Evans

Statistical work: the changing occupational landscape Kevin McConway

Administrative data: The creation of Big Data Harvey Goldstein and Ruth Gilbert

What’s new about Data Analytics? Ifan Shepherd and Gary Hearne

Social media data Adrian Tear and Humphrey Southall

Part 2: Counting in a Globalised World Introduction: Sally Ruane and Jeff Evans

Adult Skills Surveys and Transnational Organisations: Globalising Educational Policy Jeff Evans

Interpreting survey data: Towards valid estimates of poverty in the South Roy Carr-Hill

Counting the Population in Need of International Protection Globally Brad Blitz, Alessio D’Angelo and Eleonore Kofman

Tax justice and the challenges of measuring illicit financial flows Richard Murphy

Part 3: Statistics and the Changing Role of the State Section Introduction: Sally Ruane and Humphrey Southall

The control and ‘fitness for purpose’ of UK Official Statistics David Rhind

The statistics of devolution David Byrne

The uneven impact of welfare reform Tina Beatty and Steve Fothergill

‘From ‘Welfare’ to ‘Workfare’ – and Back Again? Social Insecurity and the Changing Role of the State’ Christopher Deeming and Ron Johnston

Access to data and NHS privatisation: reducing public accountability Sally Ruane

Part 4: Economic Life Section Introduction: Humphrey Southall and Jeff Evans

The ‘distribution question’: Measuring and evaluating trends in inequality  Stewart Lansley 

Changes in working life Paul Bivand 

The Financial System Rebecca Boden 

The difficulty of building comprehensive tax avoidance data Prem Sikka

Tax and spend decisions: did austerity improve financial numeracy and literacy?  David Walker

Part 5: Inequalities in Health and Well-being Introduction: Sally Ruane and Humphrey Southall 

Health divides Anonymous

Measuring social well-being Roy Carr-Hill

Re-engineering health policy research to measure equity impacts Tim Doran and Richard Cookson

The Generation Game: Ending the phoney information war between young and old Jay Ginn and Neil Duncan-Jordan

Part 6 : Advancing social progress through critical statistical literacy Introduction Jeff Evans, Sally Ruane, and Humphrey Southall

The Radical Statistics Group: Using Statistics for Progressive Social Change  Jeff Evans and Ludi Simpson

Lyme disease politics and evidence-based policy-making in the UK Kate Bloor

Counting the uncounted: contestations over casualisation data in Australian universities Nour Dados, James Goodman and Keiko Yasukawa

The Quantitative Crisis in UK Sociology Malcolm Williams, Luke Sloan and Charlotte Brookfield

Critical Statistical Literacy and Interactive Data Visualisations Jim Ridgway, James Nicholson, Sinclair Sutherland and Spencer Hedger

Full fact: What a difference a dataset makes? Amy Sippitt 

Data journalism and/as data activism Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru

Epilogue Jeff Evans, Humphrey Southall and Sally Ruane

Editorial – Radical Statistics Issue 117 (2017)

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Issue 117 is now online, available as open access. Below is the editorial.

This is the first post-2017 Edinburgh Conference Issue. I/we have to
apologise for the tardiness in appearance; been more than a bit
submerged by other tasks. Anyway, I/we think that most of the 60+
participants enjoyed and profited from the Conference.

We have been waiting for the papers from that February Conference
for four months and have only received two; so we have decided to
publish an issue with our backlog of submitted papers, and make the
next issue the 2017 Conference papers.

These are a very mixed bag. The first is a paper, which will be seen as
controversial, by Ian Plewis on Glyphosate and Green Politics reviews
the evidence for and against ‘Round-up’ (and glyphosate more
generally) with a special focus on the confusion of hazard with risk
and the dodgy sampling and statistical methods employed. It is most
certainly worth reading carefully before jumping to any hasty
judgements; if nothing else he shows that (most of) the ‘Green’
evidence is hyped and suspect.

This is followed by a forensic examination of Welsh School Inspection
Reports by Robert Moore showing how ……

Then there is a fascinating two-pager by Larry Lesser – our first but I
hope not only statistical poet – on the ‘recent’ history of the portrayal
of the normal distribution, which is our new cover page.

On the other side of the normality sandwich, we have an article on the
appalling state of Irish breathalyser statistics by Frank Houghton
which ‘links’ – totally fortuitously – with the article by Roy Carr-Hill in
the previous issue.

The last article is by Dougal Hutchison analysing and reviewing the
success – or otherwise – of the Indian government in providing equal
educational opportunities to primary school children, focussing on the
bottom quintile and on Scheduled Tribes. He concludes that whilst
impressive gains have been made, there are still wide disparities
between these two disadvantaged groups and the rest.
Obviously a very eclectic collection and I am not going to make any
attempt to link them, other than that they are all very interesting
papers.

The issue is back to its usual length because there are two additional
pieces. One is a very critical review by Neil Wilson of a book on Basic
Income by Van Parijs and Vanderborght.

The other is the text – finally agreed on among ‘members; of the
Working Group set up at the 2016 RadStats meeting in York – of a
proposal for the issue raised by Palestinians to support Boycott,
Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israeli University institutions
(not individuals). We’ll know whether they have responded positively
before you get this issue.

Roy Carr-Hill
Radical Statistics Editor

2018 Conference programme

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On 24 February, 2018 a full line-up of expert speakers will gather at the Radstats conference in London with the theme ‘21st Century Inequality in the UK‘.

As well as speakers there will be workshops and plenty of lively discussion.

Registration is only £50 (£30 student/low income) for the day including lunch.

Please spread the word  using this flyer to print and display.

The 2018 Annual General Meeting will immediately follow the conference, and there are social events over the weekend.

Newcomers and continuing members are very welcome to attend!

Issue 115 now online

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We had a reasonably successful 2016 conference in York late February with about 60 participants. I think most people enjoyed it.

We have been waiting for the papers from the February Conference for several months and have at last received three; together with a follow-up to a previous article and some other bits and pieces, we now have a respectable ‘November 2016’ issue. All these papers were written and completed before the Brexit referendum unless otherwise specified.

The conference papers are by Jonathan Bradshaw on trends in Child Poverty; by Stewart Lansley on trends in inequality in income; and by Andrew Street on Financial Crisis in the NHS. We have an additional paper by Lisa Buckner on census-based local labour market research, and a response by John Hume to the criticism of his article in the previous issue on work capability assessment; together with updates by Jonathan Rosenhead on the academic boycott of Israel, on progress with the next RadStats book on Social Statistics by Jeff Evans and the provisional programme for the 2017 RadStats Conference on Saturday 18th February in Edinburgh.

Once again a very eclectic collection and no attempt is being made to link them, other than that they are all very interesting papers. View issue 115.

In this editorial, written only a couple of weeks after the second populist Trump ‘shock’ of the year, the previous question has to be re-emphasised: why have data and information had so little impact on political debates (and obviously that lack of impact is multiplied several times in terms of the impact of our information) and how that can be changed. Once again, the appeal to ‘take back control of our country’ was very powerful – and will be in France with Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands – but it is very disconcerting to believe that information has NO effect at all. What can we do – or what could be done by others – about it?.

Following on from the Brexit debate, much of the US Election debate was based on misleading economic and immigration information, yet attempts to deliver correct information had absolutely no impact. Why Not? Our problem is that ‘we’ have not understood the ways in which ‘information’ is adsorbed or understood by different socio-economic groups. Perhaps there should be real – rather than virtual – answers this time.
Finally, an urgent appeal for contributors / papers; we are seriously running out of material!

Roy Carr-Hill

Statistics of Brexit – 2017 Conference, Edinburgh

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How have statistics been used in the arguments for Britain remaining in or leaving the EU? What do statistics of Brexit tell us about social inequalities and social change? What evidence is needed to assess the implications of Brexit proposals?

The upcoming Radical Statistics Conference 2017, on Saturday 18th February 2017 at the Quaker Meeting Housing in Central Edinburgh, will address these important questions by taking into consideration a range of perspectives (Demographic, Economic, Media, Law, Politics and Policy) and engaging in a timely and topical discussion about the “Statistics of Brexit”.

The format and structure of the event, with five keynote speakers, two workshops and a panel discussion, will provide plenty of opportunities for interaction and discussion on the role of statistics during the EU referendum campaign and beyond, indeed, only a few weeks before article 50 is triggered at the end of March, 2017. While it has been argued[1] that antipathy to statistics is one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016, it is particularly incumbent on those who use statistics to support progressive social change and to give a much needed understanding of which data and conclusions are trustworthy in the so-called post-truth culture. As one of the most important decisions the British public has faced in decades, this event will provide a forum for discussion and debate on Brexit that promises to be evidenced-based and from a truly diverse set of perspectives.

View the programme, with link to booking form, for more information and to reserve your place now!

– by Albert Sabater

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/19/crisis-of-statistics-big-data-democracy

Radical Statistics, Issue 114 online

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Issue 114 of our journal is now online for your reading pleasure.

Articles “include a paper by the Acton family and friends on understanding or at least interpreting the demography of the Roma and other gypsy ethnic groups; two papers on thumb114problems with assessment processes, one on work capability assessment by John Hume and one on the predictive assessment of young children; a paper on the demography of the elderly population in 2014; and a paper on scientific collaboration in knowledge networks by Thng. Obviously a very eclectic collection and I am not going to make any attempt to link them, other than that they are all very interesting papers.”

– Roy Carr Hill, Editor

Radical Statistics Issue 113

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Radical Statistics Issue 113 is now online. Below is the Editorial:

cover 113Following the publication of the two general competition winners in the last issue of Radical Statistics, this issue includes the two winners of the 2014 student essay competition. The winner, Clara Musto, embarks on a critical analysis of the ‘gateway hypothesis’, i.e. cannabis as a stepping stone drug. She does so by focusing on Uruguay, where cannabis was recently decriminalised. In her essay, Geraldine Clark, who came second place in the student competition, focuses on higher education and more specifically the expectations and aspirations of non-traditional students at a post-1992 University. The essay provides new knowledge about the role of habitus and capital in explaining these students’ expectations and aspirations and adds to our understanding of these in relation to the widening participation across social classes and socioeconomic backgrounds in the UK.

The theme of widening participation in UK universities is continued by Vikki Boliver. Vikki examines the recent Russell Group publication Opening Doors and shows that the claims made here about widening access in our most elite universities do not stand up to scrutiny. Rather these institutions remain unrepresentative and this has changed little over the last decade.

In his article John Veit-Wilson unpicks the claims of UK Chancellor, George Osborne, to be introducing a ‘living wage’. John highlights the differences between this fictitious ‘living wage’ and the living wage as calculated on the basis of a decency level. The article demonstrates problems relating to measurement ownership and difficulties that emerge when the naming of a measure becomes political.

Included in this issue is also a set of reports from the 2015 Radical Statistics Conference that was themed Good Data, Good Policy. These include a conference report from the organisers, two of the concluding reflections, by Ludi Simpson and Alison Macfarlane, which address the past and future of Radical Statistics, and a workshop report by Ludi Simpson and Nissa Finney in which they imagine what a community agenda around race statistics would look like.

Rachel Lara Cohen
Trude Sundberg
Eileen Magnello
Larry Brownstein
Email: editors@radstats.org.uk