News and Blog

On 2nd February Prof Paul Chaney presented the findings of a recent study of political representation to a seminar organised by the Chwarae Teg Research Hub. The paper analysed the parliamentary scrutiny of the substantive representation of women (SRW) in UK Governments’ Post-War legislative programmes. The SRW refers to the situation whereby women’s needs and…

  Telling stories has always been a good way to grab people’s attention and get them to understand what is important, but it’s not something that academic researchers are very accustomed to doing – after all, is it not a normal part of their training. However, carefully worded and nuanced academic reports – however precise…

  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…

As part of the Representing Communities project I worked with a group of Year 10 pupils for four months. The aim of this part of the research was to engage with the young people through photography to explore their perceptions of community life. This included some discussion of their feelings towards media representations of their community, which…

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…

How young people make choices about university, where and what to study has been a question asked by many social researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike. Research has shown that when young people make choices about going to university, a range of factors come into play including peer influences, their families’ experience of university and their…

Last week the 6th Annual Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) Conference took place at Cardiff’s iconic Millennium Stadium. The WISERD Conference is the largest of its kind in Wales, and brings together practitioners, policy makers and social scientists to discuss and debate a range of topical themes such as health; social care; wellbeing;…

The Merthyr Rising 2015 festival is a three day event aimed at remembering the town’s radical past and promoting a positive image of the town’s future with a mixture of music, film, performance and debate. SCHeP were proud to take part in this year’s event by sponsoring and supporting the Waun Common Debates These debates were inspired…

In recent years the political, economic and social climate in which volunteering by older adults occurs has changed significantly, with the onset of an economic downturn, concern about pensions, a change in the public policy context for volunteering following a change of government, and the abolition of default retirement age. The notion of ‘unretirement’ is…

A new book by John Hills explores key issues in the current debate about ‘welfare’ and the welfare state. The debate contrasts a stagnant group of people benefiting from it all with the rest who pay in and get nothing back – ‘skivers’ against ‘strivers’. John explains how, because people’s lives and circumstances change, most…