Completed Research Projects

Welfare at a (Social) Distance | Kate Summers | 2020-2022

Welfare at a (Social) Distance is a major national research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19.

The benefits system is crucial to supporting people during, and after, the COVID-19 crisis. During the pandemic, with a growing number of new claimants, the system faced two challenges. Firstly, to ensure people quickly got the money they needed. Secondly, to make sure that people are helped to return to work or supported further if unable to work. In this project, the researchers provided vital information on how we are meeting these challenges and where the system is struggling.

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DyLAniE: Methods for Analysis of Longitudinal Dyadic Data with Applications to Intergenerational Exchanges of Family Support | Jouni Kuha | 2017-2020

This methodological project is motivated by substantive research questions on intergenerational help and support within families. The project team includes social statisticians from the Department of Statistics and Department of Methodology at LSE, and social scientists from the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at LSE and the Institute for Economic and Social Research (ISER) at the University of Essex.

The principal aim of the project is to develop statistical latent variable models and methods of estimation for the analysis of clustered multivariate dyadic data, where the dyads represent, for example, adult individuals and their non-coresident parents and the latent variables their tendencies to give and receive practical and financial support from each other. This combines measurement models that relate binary indicators of assistance given and received to the latent tendencies, and regression models that relate these tendencies to characteristics of the individuals and their parents. Applied to cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data, the models have been used to investigate the factors that are associated with giving and receiving different kinds of support, and with reciprocity and complementarity in these exchanges.

The project is funded by the ESRC and EPSRC and the primary investigator is Professor Fiona Steele.

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The Emergence of Inequality in Social Groups | Milena Tsvetkova | 2014-2018

From small organisations to entire nations and society at large, socio economic inequality is one of the most significant problems facing the world today. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, this four-year project will approach the problem of inequality from a new perspective and with new computational social science methods. An interdisciplinary team of sociologists, computer scientists, and physicists will develop and conduct large-scale controlled experiments online. 

This method will allow the construction of “artificial societies” comprising dozens of individuals who interact over days or weeks. Manipulating the structure of these multiple parallel worlds will help identify the structural conditions that give rise to inequality and inform policy and managerial interventions that reduce it.

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Community-led recovery after the Grenfell Tower fire | Flora Cornish I 2017-2019

How can a community produce positive change as part of its post-disaster recovery? And can university-community collaborations contribute to empowering locally-owned recovery stories? The Grenfell Tower fire, in June 2017, devastated a West London community. It is widely accepted that community groups and individuals took leadership of the response to help their neighbours in the first hours, days, and months of uncertainty as the state assessed matters, apologised, set up processes, progressively lost local legitimacy, preserved core functions and insulated itself from damage. The ramifications of that situation are still unfolding.

Using a model of community-engaged research, Flora is currently researching community authority relations in the aftermath of the disaster through a 2-year ethnography and interview study, and an experiment in ‘public social history’, working collaboratively to produce locally-authored stories of recovery. Grounded in respect for the community’s role in producing its own recovery, the project aims to contribute to understandings of community resilience for future disaster responders, and to academic understandings of mechanisms of social change and stasis. 

The project has begun as a knowledge-exchange project, marshalling materials with which to build accounts of the process of recovery from different points of view, collaborating with community members on their own stories of recovery, as a foundation for developing academic versions. The project also enables knowledge exchange with emergency management professionals and policy makers in the interest of improving the environment for community-led disaster response and recovery. It is funded by a grant from LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact.