Research projects

WISERD Research Associate, Dr Kate Moles, successfully secured funding to run a digital storytelling project with young women living in Cardiff. Building on the success of the Beacon for Wales funded ‘Sounding the Way’ project in 2011 – where young male residents of Grangetown produced audio walks allowing them to explore their community and express…

Overview WISERD Education has the potential to change the landscape of education research in Wales and will put Wales at the forefront of research capacity building developments in the UK and beyond. The main aims of the Programme are: to enhance the capacity to carry out high quality educational research within the higher education sector in Wales;…

Overview This project was aimed at improving the linkages between research evidence and policy development in Wales (and elsewhere). It was based on a partnership between WISERD and the Welsh Government (WG); and involved the development of four Evidence Symposia, each of which focused on a key policy theme. Each Symposium brought together leading researchers…

Overview Working in partnership across Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea Universities and funded by the NISCHR, the All Wales Academic Social Care Research Collaboration (ASCC) sought to strengthen the capacity of HEIs and their partner agencies to deliver on an agreed and prioritised research agenda to respond to national and local needs. The three regional teams contributed to…

In 2010 the UK coalition Government committed itself to an active policy of fiscal consolidation designed to ‘eliminate’ the structural deficit by the end of the current parliament (HM Budget, March 2011). As part of their consolidation plans the Government announced its intention to promote a rebalancing of the UK economy, away from public sector…

The UK gender Pay gap 1998-2013: What is the role of the public sector? The Quarterly Labour Force Survey was used to compare gender wage gap in the public and private sectors between 1998 and 2013 and to identify the contribution of the sectoral employment allocation to the overall gender pay gap. The study covered…

Pay determination and outcomes in the public sector Data from the Labour Force Survey was used to investigate public sector wage differential in the UK 1994 to 2012. In the first of a set of analyses, three separate sub-periods are considered in detail, each characterise broadly different government policy stances towards the public sector and different…

The project aimed to highlight the potential value of an important but currently underutilised dataset, the Welsh Local Labour Force Survey (WLLFS). The main aim was to provide new evidence relating to labour market transitions in Wales. In terms of the analysis we propose two separate pieces of research that both use the WLLFS to examine ‘at…

Overview Professor Chris Taylor was awarded an ESRC Mid-Career Development Fellowship to carry out an analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The Economic and Social Research Centre (ESRC) awards only 10 to 15 Mid-Career Development Fellowships each year. They are intended to enable outstanding researchers to develop their careers by taking their research in a new…

WISERD undertook an independent evaluation of the Foundation Phase early years education policy for the Welsh Government. The Foundation Phase (FP) is an early intervention approach to learning for all children aged three to seven years in Wales. It is based on principles of experiential learning – or ‘learning through doing’ – and marks a radical…

Overview In partnership with Old Bell 3 Ltd and IFF Research, WISERD undertook a survey of ERDF assisted businesses under the Convergence and Competitiveness Programmes for WEFO. The survey findings supplement existing Programme monitoring data to assess the effectiveness of the ERDF Enterprise, Business Finance, and R&D and Innovation Priorities. The survey also provided useful information to WEFO…

Overview The research sought to directly address the NIHR commissioning brief by firstly developing a new method of measuring alcohol outlet density in Wales using Geographical Information System (GIS) methods which include a more realistic and robust measure of population accessibility to alcohol outlets than previously published methods. It would obtain data on alcohol outlets from the…

The Skills and Employment Survey (2012) collects data on what people do at work, what skills they use and how they work. It is the sixth in a series of representative sample surveys of workers in Britain stretching back over 30 years. These cross-sectional surveys provide the means to chart and explain the changing pattern of…

WISERD analysed turnout data for the 2011 NAW elections and produced a report for the Electoral Commission.

Behaviour change is a topic which is of key importance to policy makers both in the Welsh Government and further afield. Behaviour change also emerged as a key theme during the WISERD localities stakeholder interviews and the subsequent stakeholder feedback sessions have indicated that a range of 3rd sector stakeholders in Wales are engaging with the…

Overview As a part of the development process for the Connected Communities programme, the AHRC supported research reviews in 2011 to address a wide range of underpinning issues. The aim of these reviews was to: stimulate debate and provide some early outputs from the programme; inform future discussions about its shape, focus and priorities; and…

The project engaged with the various ways that the Heads of the Valleys region has been bound. Drawing on policy documents; the WISERD localities stakeholder interviews and some small scale follow up interviews, and engaging with different levels of stakeholders (for example: residents, community activists, etc).  Using Agnew and Duncan’s Location, Locale and Sense of…

This project sought to problematise homogenising narratives of older people as predominately ‘static’ and ‘passive’, and therefore somehow less implicated in wider social and economic networks; perceptions compounded by the context of rural peripherality. While older people’s experiences may offer insights into the changing historical shape of communities, it is also vital to understand how older…

Overview This project was concerned with the impact on workers, their families and neighbourhoods of the closure of the Anglesey Aluminium (AA) smelter in September 2009, formerly one of the major employers in the Holyhead area. Previous studies of the impact of factory closure on local communities have focused on the individual impacts of redundancy as…