News and Blog

Cardiff’s new sbarc|spark hub will bring together researchers to connect across social science research disciplines to create new ways of working. Professor Sally Power, WISERD, recently published a paper examining calls for an ‘evidence ecosystem’ to address the disconnect between university-led education research, and education policy and practice. Here, she shares thoughts on what the Social…

Since February 2021, we have been working with a community group in South Wales who are concerned about the air quality in their local area. We have adopted a participatory approach that facilitates the group’s work, but which also recognises the expertise of individual members and tracks how the group develops, shares and uses this…

Characteristics closely linked to educational outcomes can vary by individual pupils’ situations and can be the result of a complex interplay between a number of risk factors. For example, being classified as having a disability such as communication difficulties, and experiencing behavioural and mental health problems can increase the risk of losing school days, which…

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities in society. In doing so, it has reinforced the importance of the government’s ‘levelling up’ policy agenda. In terms of protected characteristics, attention focused most immediately on ethnicity given the differences in health risk posed by COVID-19 and was subsequently concerned with gender as a result of…

In this blog post Alan Felstead of Cardiff University discusses the publication of his new book Remote Working: A Research Overview.  The book provides an accessible overview of the history of remote working and the impact of the massive shifts in the location of work that have occurred because of the global pandemic. One of the…

As part of the project Trust, Human Rights and Civil Society in WISERD’s civil society research programme, I’ve been analysing the human rights situation of children in Cambodia. This is an appropriate, yet hitherto neglected area of enquiry because it is almost three decades since the country ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights…

I’ve been analysing civil society organisations’ (CSOs’) perspectives on the crisis facing an estimated one million Rohingya people, members of a Muslim minority group (a variation of the Sunni religion), that have fled persecution in the western state of Rakhine, Myanmar. This work is part of the project Trust, Human Rights and Civil Society in…

The news often paints a rather grim future for Gen Z, the generation born between the late 1990s and early 2010s. There is low perceived job security, housing costs continue to rise relative to wages, and the 2012 tuition fee increase means that many now graduate with more debt than previous generations. The ongoing impacts…

In my previous blog post, I discussed regional variations in attitudes towards climate change, with people living in Wales appearing more sceptical in comparison to those in other parts of Britain. However, attitudes to climate change also differ according to people’s characteristics such as gender, age and educational level, and these will affect regional differences…

Climate change has become one of the most pressing issues facing policymakers across the globe. The topic has received increased attention in the United Kingdom in the past few months because the COP26 summit on climate change has now started in Glasgow and will run until November 12th. COP26 is the 26th meeting of the…