Publications

The Labour Force Survey is used to examine the influence of sector on the UK gender pay gap 1997–2015. The assessment is twofold: first comparing gender pay gaps within sectors and second through identifying the contribution of the concentration of women in the public sector to the overall gender pay gap. The long-term narrowing of…

In this article we discuss findings from our ethnography investigating how volunteering in local associational life is changing, asking whether structural factors fixed in localities remain important or whether, as others have suggested, volunteering is becoming disembedded from place. Across two locations, we observe how situational variables, including belonging, identification and interaction, remain important determinants…

WISERD Education was launched in 2012 in order to change the landscape of educational research in Wales. The main aims of the Programme were: to enhance the capacity to carry out high quality educational research within the higher education sector in Wales; •    to undertake research activities designed to improve the quality of learning and…

In July 2017, the Welsh Government appointed OB3 Research, in conjunction with WISERD, to undertake an evaluation of the Seren Network. A formative and process evaluation of the Seren Network was commissioned to inform decisions about the criteria for young people’s participation and the design and delivery of the programme at national and local levels….

This report reveals the latest figures of Wales’ Towns and Cities including the number of retail premises, the vacancy rates, the retail structure and the relationship with socio-economic characteristics and geographical typology. The main takeaways: The vacancy rate decreased in Wales in all three location types (Retail parks, high streets and shopping centres) that LDC track and…

Approaches to calculating spatial accessibility within existing indices of multiple deprivation (IMD) methodologies are based on ‘traditional’ accessibility metrics and tend not to adopt more recent methodological enhancements. In particular, the last decade has seen a relatively large body of studies that have applied floating catchment area (FCA) methods that account for both service supply…

Given that there appears to be a dichotomy within the BRICS, we focus on Russia and China, discussing recent developments in their respective Higher Educational systems, and what these changes might mean in terms of internationalization. Moreover, given that the importance of Higher Education for a balanced development is something that is now widely recognised by International Organizations,…

The chapter provides an extensive review of the literature on student choice of destination. This identifies push and pull factors influencing Chinese students’ decisions about the country of destination for overseas study. It shows also that in addition to push factors, largely concerned with general issues regarding the country of origin, and pull factors, concerned…

The chapter focuses on the evolution of education as public policy in contemporary China, that is the period since Deng Xiaoping’s Opening-Up and Market Reform of the economy. This has seen extensive changes to the provision and content of China’s formal education system generally, and especially higher education; and in the relationship between education, the…

An interview transcript can be a rich source of geographical references whose potential are not always fully realised in their conventional analysis. Geo-referencing techniques can be used to assign a spatial footprint to place names, adding value to these data and allowing the geographic information within them to be exploited when coupled with GIS technology….