News and Blog

The Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD) is the Welsh Government’s official measure of relative (‘ranked’) deprivation for small areas in Wales. WIMD is used by government and other organisations to target services to address social disadvantage. For example, as part of their programme to increase access to higher education, the Higher Education Funding Council…

2023 brought a new wave of strikes following six months of increasing industrial action across the country. More and more workers, including those in key public sector roles, voted for industrial action often with huge majorities and mostly comfortably clearing the high ballot turnout threshold imposed by government legislation aimed at making strikes more difficult….

The prospects for political reform in Britain will be discussed at Aberystwyth University this month, when Professor Alan Renwick delivers the annual Welsh Politics and Society Lecture. The lecture, ‘Do the UK Public want Democratic Reform?’, will be held on Thursday 25th May at 6pm in the International Politics Main Hall, Penglais Campus. Entry is…

In a new, open access paper, Rhys Davies and Professor Alan Felstead share insights from quiz data collected before and after Covid-19 to examine what short-term effects the pandemic has had on job quality in the UK. The results show that non-pay-related job quality has improved, differences between occupations have shrunk and the growth of…

Dr Emily Lowthian is a lecturer at Swansea University in the Department of Education and Childhood Studies in the School of Social Sciences. Emily presented her research with Dr Rebecca Anthony, Georgia Fee at a WISERD lunchtime seminar in March. Online communication behaviours, such as social media use, are often received negatively in the mass…

Principal Research Fellow, Dr Igor Calzada has been awarded a Learned Society of Wales grant to take forward his transdisciplinary social sciences research on Wales and Basque Country cooperation with an online workshop on 5 May. Wales and the Basque Country share some interesting commonalities in their development, allowing for opportunities to discuss devolution and…

Our previous studies examining variation in access to sporting facilities in relation to socio-economic patterns in Wales have been predicated on an assumption of private travel as the means of transport. We are now including travel distances and times for alternative modes of transport as part of our accessibility calculations. These are derived from an…

This blog post is the second part of a series presenting preliminary findings on children’s well-being in Wales before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. It uses data from the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB) – Children’s Worlds, a worldwide survey on children’s subjective well-being, with this wave comprising 20 countries in total. The survey…

The role of voluntary organisations in tackling polarisation in local communities will be discussed by the Future Generations Commissioner in Aberystwyth next month. Aberystwyth University academics from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD) will jointly host a symposium with partners from the Voluntary Sector Studies Network on Wednesday 24 May…

Exhibition held at the Bandstand, Aberystwyth 13 –15 April 2023 This exhibition was the first related to our ongoing project that uses photography to understand how people think about independence in Wales, Scotland and Catalonia. For these nations, becoming independent would mean leaving the state which they are currently a part of (the UK and…