News and Blog

Dementia: “illness” label can lower mood

WISERD Director, Professor Ian Rees Jones, comments on new findings from the IDEAL project which focuses on the potential for living well with dementia from the perspective of people with dementia and their primary carers. Research from the IDEAL project has revealed that people who perceive dementia symptoms as an illness feel more negative than…

What’s in a name? How family carers understand dementia

  The ‘Prime Minister’s challenge on dementia 2020’ focuses on the need to improve the public’s awareness of dementia; one common misconception about dementia is that it is a normal part of ageing. Another area identified in the report is the need to improve diagnosis rates, with current figures indicating that only 59% of those…

Better understanding of caregivers perceptions of dementia could improve the level of support they are offered, new paper finds

    Illness representations, or the way individuals perceive an illness, often shape responses to that illness, affecting the type and level of care and support administered to an individual, either by themselves or by those with caring responsibilities. A recently published paper co-authored by Catherine Quinn and Linda Clare from the Centre for Research…

Stronger communities, healthier people: Medical summer placements November 2015

In the first week of November 2015 CISHeW’s Strong Communities, Healthier People (SCHeP) project hosted the first Student Selected Component of the new Curriculum 21 for Cardiff University medical students.  The aim of this component was to give second year medical students the opportunity to engage with local communities to get some real hands on understanding of…

Making the case for the Social Sciences in Wales launch event – In pictures

  Wednesday 25th November saw the launch of ‘Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales’ at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. “Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales” is the tenth in a series of publicationsproduced by the Academy of Social Sciences and its Campaign for Social Science in order to celebrate the real and important…

Has the disability employment gap really declined?

If you keep track of key measures of disability equality in the UK, you’ll know that the gap in employment rates between disabled and non-disabled working-age people has gone down over the past fifteen years.  And you’d be in good company. Many experts have flagged this trend: Dame Carol Black in her influential 2008 Review, DWP indicators…

‘People, Places and Policy: Knowing contemporary Wales through new localities’ – A new WISERD book published

Our book has finally been published! We say finally, because the idea for the book started to take shape five years ago during the first phase of WISERD. During this phase we were interested in understanding how different localities in Wales were behaving in relation to devolution and devolved policy areas and we developed a research strand…

Want to get a good night’s sleep, kids? Turn off Facebook and Twitter, say researchers

The impact of social media on young people’s lives is underlined starkly today as a new study by researchers at the Cardiff University-based Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research Data (WISERD) reports that more than one in five teenagers say they “almost always” wake up during the night to look at or post messages….

Stress, Environment and the Human Body

What effects do different environments have upon stress levels in the human body? What affect does it have upon our well-being and health? In order to test this in June 2014 WISERD’s biomapping project was invited by BBC Coast to ‘stress-test’ its presenter Nicholas Crane. The WISERD funded biomapping research project, led by Professor Chris Taylor(WISERD) and Dr Jon Anderson (CPLAN), ‘stress-tested’ the BBC…