Radical
Statistics
Radical Statistics Critical Essay Competition 2002
The first Radical Statistics Essay Competition took place this year. The essay was ‘An original essay which addresses a current social research/policy question and involves the critical use and interpretation of relevant data sources’. There were three major prizes (£500, £250, £100) and three consolation prizes (one year’s free subscription to Radical Statistics).
All except those teaching in the higher education sector were eligible to enter and some effort was made to get entrants from the more unlikely constituencies; further education, schools, prisons etc. Account was taken in the judging of age and experience. In the event we had 14 entrants, worldwide.
The essay was won by Dr Paul Henman, a research fellow at Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia for an essay titled ‘Deconstructing Welfare Dependency: the case of Australian Welfare Reform’. Other prize winners were Debora Price, Univ. Surrey, UK, and Michael Naughton, Univ. Bristol, UK. The following entries were commended; Yuka Nakaniski, Japan, Michael Albers, Netherlands, Lynne Cooke, Oxford, UK
The entries showed wide variation in subject matter and were generally considered to be of high quality.
It is intended that the three prize winning essays will be mounted shortly on the Radical Statistics web site www.radstats.org.uk and all prize winners and commended entries are invited to send their essay to the newsletter editors for inclusion in a future issue.
We hope to run this competition again in two years’ time. The judging procedure was as follows initially the troika members examined all entries and decided on a short list of 7 entries which were then given to three second round judges who ranked in order of priority, giving reasons for their ranking. The final choice was made, subject to eligibility, by an average of the rankings given.
I would like to thanks all the judges involved in particular who worked effectively under quite extreme time pressures to deliver their verdicts.
I would welcome any suggestions of means of publicising this essay in future years, comments on eligibility criteria and of any (provisional) offers to act as judges.
Russell Ecob, for Radical Statistics Troika.
Email: Russell@ecob-consulting.com
