News and Blog

On 20 February 2023, Professor Alan Felstead was interviewed for a BBC television programme investigating the falling footfall in city centres such as Cardiff and the rise in some of the smaller towns surrounding the Welsh capital. Similar patterns are evident across the UK. Professor Felstead’s research shows that one of main reasons for these…

Everything starts with a seed… and so did our adventures as a fledgling research team based in the UK and South Africa, brought together through the British Council Farming for Climate Justice programme 2021-2022, coordinated by a transdisciplinary team of experienced researchers from the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University and…

Since April 2017, UK employers with over 250 employees have been required to annually report their gender pay gap to the public. The introduction of pay transparency legislation is undoubtably one of the most significant policy developments aimed at tackling the gender pay gap worldwide. The original publication comprised 10,000 organisational gender pay gaps, attracting…

Dr Igor Calzada, Principal Research Fellow at WISERD, has completed his role as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence (S-I-R) 2022-23 at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB) via the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Dr Calzada was formally welcomed by the university during a reception on 10th October 2022 (you can read the interview conducted before the event, watch the video…

There is no denying that the disruption to daily life caused by the coronavirus pandemic had a profound influence on children’s well-being, with various international organisations (eg, WHO, UNESCO, WFP, UNICEF) requesting that more be done to assist children in coping with this, to  avoid long-term negative consequences. In Wales, data from the 2021 International…

On December 19th, the 2022 Wales Housing Research Conference took place at Cardiff University’s Glamorgan Building, allowing delegates to come together and share research evidence relating to some of the most pressing Welsh housing issues. Co-hosted by WISERD’s Wales Housing Research Network, the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, and Shelter Cymru, this year’s conference…

The experiences of workers will be investigated as part of a major survey led by Cardiff University and funded mainly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The Skills and Employment Survey 2023 (SES2023), which also involves researchers at UCL, the Universities of Oxford and Surrey and the National Centre for Social Research, will…

In our last blog post we looked at how WISERD’s free interactive mapping tool UnionMaps reveals the complex patterns in trade union membership that exist across Great Britain. Analysis revealed that the overall downward trend in union density that is observed across Great Britain as a whole masks very different local fortunes for the trade…

Recent waves of strike action by nurses, train drivers, ambulance drivers, university lecturers, teachers and others besides has highlighted the prominent position that trade unions continue to hold within the UK. An important factor that determines the power and influence of trade unions, either within an organisation or across a sector, is the proportion of…

A new WISERD paper by Andrew Price, Mitchel Langford and Gary Higgs at the University of South Wales has recently been published in the journal, Case Studies on Transport Policy. Using sports facility data from Sport Wales and open-source data on green spaces, the team examine variations in potential access to recreational opportunities by different…