LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Sonja Marzi has published a new LSE International Development blog.

This blog is titled 'Conducting transnational participatory research with women during Covid-19 remotely: an impossibility?' and relates to Sonja's current research project on migrant women in Medellín, Colombia.

Sonja was recently awarded a grant from LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund (KEI) to conduct the project and this blog shares how she responded to the unprecedented disruptions caused by COVID-19. 

This involves creating an innovative co-production research design that utilises remote video and photo diaries.

You can keep up to date with Sonja on Twitter, where more updates on this project can be found.

Assistant Professor in Quantitative Methodology Milena Tsvetkova has made a guest appearance on The Know Show podcast.

This podcast aims to make sense of the world by breaking down complex research and challenging authors on their work and what it means to everyday life.

Milena's episode is titled 'Sociological Phenomena' and discusses questions on this and a range of other areas. The podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify and more.

Professors Patrick Sturgis and Jouni Kuha have published a new LSE COVID-19 blog. This blog estimates the COVID-19 population infection rate.

The blog is titled 'Over 5 million people in Britain think they have been infected with COVID-19' and uses self-report data from a representative probability sample - the Wellcome Trust UK Monitor.

This evidence suggests around five million symptomatic infections by end of April, although Patrick and Jouni explain the caveats regarding the accuracy of reporting. Using survey data allows for comparison of infection status across demographic groups. This evidence finds no difference by sex or income which has been found for fatalities.

You can keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter, where his summary of the blog can be found.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Kate Summers has published a new article in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

This journal article is titled 'For the greater good? Ethical reflections on interviewing the ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ in qualitative research' and reflects on the ethics of interviewing to study advantage and disadvantage in qualitative research.

Kate explains the risk for ‘poor’ research participants to become ethical collateral for research agendas that aim to improve conditions of ‘poverty’ more widely. Kate then outlines the distinction between ethical obligations to individual research participants and wider relevant social groups. 

You can keep up to date with Kate on Twitter, where a full summary of the article can be found.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Chris Pósch have co-authored a new article in The Conversation.

The article is titled 'Coronavirus: survey reveals what the public wants from a contact-tracing app' and discusses the findings of their recent survey. 

The article explains that survey findings show public support for contact-tracing apps. Despite significant privacy concerns, most respondents indicated that they will download and use this app.

A sense of common fate and desire to act for the common good appears to be shown in this support for a contact tracing app that is strongly associated with the NHS. This mirrors findings outlined in another recent article that explains the belief that ‘we are all in it together’ to be more important than other factors in explaining UK lockdown compliance. 

Other co-authors of this article are Julia Yesburg and Dr Ben Bradford of UCL.

The Department of Methodology is proud to have been highly commended at the LSESU Teaching Awards 2020, in the category of 'The Award for Departmental Excellence'. The awards ceremony was streamed live on YouTube.

This award recognises organisation, student service and the fostering of departmental community. Thank you to our students for nominating us and to our staff for providing the support that earned this recogniton.

We would like to congratulate the winners of this award, the Department of Geography and Environment.

We were also proud to have so many members of our Department nominated for individual awards. Thank you to all of those that made nominations.

Department of Methodology research student Imre Bárd has co-authored a new book with Elisabeth Hildt, published by Elsevier.

This is titled 'Ethical Dimensions of Commercial and DIY Neurotechnologies Volume Three' and is the latest release in the 'Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics' series. This series aims to address developments in neuroethics and connected topics in biomedical ethics.

Earlier this year, Imre also worked with researchers with Nesta on a report commissioned by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This report is titled 'Regulator approaches to facilitate, support and enable innovation' and explores innovation-friendly regulatory approaches as well as practical methods that regulators can adopt to stimulate and support innovation.

Assistant Professor Dr Chana Teeger has a new journal article published in Socio-Economic Review.

This mixed-methods paper is titled 'Economic and cultural determinants of elite attitudes toward redistribution' and draws on in-depth interview and survey data with political and economic elites from Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay.

The paper finds that elites' perceptions of the poor affect their support for redistributive policies, even when they acknowledge that inequality has negative consequences for themselves.

Other co-authors of this paper are Matias López, Pedro Marques and Graziella Moraes Dias da Silva. You can keep up to date with Chana on Twitter. 

Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis Dr Audrey Alejandro has published a new book, titled 'Western Dominance in International Relations'.

This book is a methodological and pedagogical demonstration of how to use discourse analysis and reflexivity to produce innovative results and decenter ourselves from socialised common sense.

Audrey challenges the idea that the internationalisation of social sciences in the ‘Global South’ is conditioned by a core-periphery ‘Western dominance’. Rather, Audrey argues that states remain the main agents in the globalisation of science.

Audrey engages in a Foucaldian discourse analysis of the critical literature and shows it to reproduce the very eurocentrism it denounces by denying the agency of “non-Western” states, essentialising “Western” vs “non-Western” actors, universaling the history and standards of academic publication legitimised in the US/UK and presenting them as "the only game in town".

Find more information here and on Twitter. Purchase this book here.

Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis Dr Audrey Alejandro will be speaking as part of a 'Social science meets geoscience' panel at the EGU General Assembly 2020.

Audrey will appear alongside John Bruun to present their work on the topic of 'Talking about the physics of climate change’. During a live online discussion on Monday 4 May.

This will explore the role of discourse and communication for the production of knowledge in the physics of climate change.

Find more information here and keep up to date with Audrey on Twitter.

Professors Patrick Sturgis, Jon Jackson and Jouni Kuha have been successful in receiving a grant from LSE Pro-Director for Research, Simon Hix to undertake research.

This survey research will focus on compliance with lockdown, the authority of the police, economic and health trade-offs and the impacts on employment, income, and education. The survey will be carried out via the Kantar Public Voice online probability panel, with which the Department has an existing collaborative agreement.

Patrick will also be taking part in the launch event of Kantar's Public Voice. This will present information on a powerful new random sample research tool and Patrick will give thoughts on the value of random sampling in survey research.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Nimesh Dhungana has published a new LSE South Asia Centre blog post.

As Nepal marks the fifth anniversary of the 2015 earthquake, this blog is titled '2015 Nepal earthquake and COVID-19: A comparison of the politics of crisis governance' and argues that citizen-centric politics of governance triggered by the earthquake can be witnessed in the immediate response to the global pandemic.

Nimesh completed his PhD research in post-earthquake Nepal and recently published another blog post to aid current and prospective PhD students during COVID-19.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson has co-written a blog piece for LSE British Politics & Policy with Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Chris Pósch, discussing lockdown compliance in the UK.

This blog is titled 'The lockdown and social norms: why the UK is complying by consent rather than compulsion' and explains that the belief that ‘we are all in it together’ is more important than other factors in explaining why the UK public has complied with lockdown measures so far.

This is the first of the findings from a survey on lockdown compliance in ten UK cities that was successful in receiving a grant from the School of Public Policy's COVID-19 fund.

Other co-authors of this blog are Julia Yesburg and Dr Ben Bradford of UCL.

Professor of Computational Social Science Ken Benoit has been appointed as the inaugural Director of the Data Science Initiative (DSI).

Ken is also Co-Director of LSE’s interdisciplinary Social & Economic Data Science (SEDS) Unit and Director of the ‘Research Methods, Data Science, and Mathematics’ Summer School programme. 

Ken commented: “Much of the data that most affects our daily lives is human-generated and involves human activities in social, economic, and political contexts. With the new Data Science Initiative, we will bridge LSE’s tremendous social science expertise with data science to better understand how society, public policy, and business in every aspect".

Keep up to date with Ken on Twitter.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Chris Pósch has been successful in receiving a grant from the School of Public Policy's COVID-19 fund.

The project is titled 'Policing the COVID-19 outbreak' and aims to understand how public views on governmental institutions, especially legal authorities, may change during the COVID-19 outbreak. This will sample participants from ten metropolitan areas from across the country and the grant will finance three additional waves of a longitudinal study.

Chris will work with Head of the Department Professor Jonathan Jackson on this project alongside Ben Bradford and others at the UCL Jill Dando Institute. 

Keep up to date with Chris and Jonathan on Twitter.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Nimesh Dhungana has published a blog post to aid current and prospective PhD students during COVID-19.

This blog is titled 'Doing PhD research in time of (COVID-19) crisis: reflections from my PhD journey' and aims to offer guidance to these individuals as they are amongst the most affected by the ongoing uncertainty.

Nimesh completed his PhD research in post-Earthquake Nepal and explains that crises force (and entice) many PhD researchers to change their original research focus. Whilst impulse topic changes are best avoided, if you are personally driven and have a ‘big picture’ intellectual puzzle that COVID-19 has ignited, then changing the course of your PhD research may be a worthwhile journey.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson recently had a paper accepted for publication by the British Journal of Criminology.

Following this, Jonathan has now co-written a blog piece for LSE British Politics & Policy, discussing the implications for policing the COVID-19 lockdown.

This blog is titled 'Public support for Live Facial Recognition and implications for COVID-19 policing' and finds that people accepted this technology if they generally trusted the police to ‘do the right thing’.

The co-authors of this blog are Julia Yesburg and Dr Ben Bradford of UCL.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson has had a paper accepted for publication by the British Journal of Criminology.

This working paper is titled 'Live Facial Recognition: Trust and Legitimacy as Predictors of Public Support for Police Use of New Technology' and reports results from a major new London-based study that explores public responses to Live Facial Recognition (LFR): a technology that enables police to carry out real-time automated identity checks in public spaces.

The study of Londoners took place before the current COVID-19 situation and findings are relevant to the current context. These findings show support for the use of new technologies, but only when respondents trust the police to use this appropriately.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Kate Summers has joined over eighty other leading social policy academics from LSE and universities across the UK in signing a letter that calls on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to raise Child Benefit to £50 per child per week.

This comes in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the letter argues this to be a simple, efficient and cost-effective way of providing urgent assistance.

Other signatories include Professor Sir John Hills of LSE CASE and Loughborough University’s Professor Baroness Lister of Burtersett.

More information can be found here, on Kate's Twitter account or by emailing Kate directly. 

Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis Dr Audrey Alejandro has started a new blog to aid student learning.

This blog is named 'The Methodological Artist' and Audrey's most recent post is titled 'What is analysis? Some tips to "become more analytical"'. This post discusses the problem of students being told that their work is 'too descriptive' and describes analysis as the "elephant in the room" within social sciences.

Keep up to date with Audrey on Twitter.

Visiting Fellow Ben Wilson has a new paper published in Population and Development Review.

The paper is titled 'Migrant Mortality Advantage Versus Origin and the Selection Hypothesis' and reports on findings from a new analysis of the 35 largest immigrant groups in the UK, by country of birth.

The study is summarised in the online magazine of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. It shows that the majority of immigrants are selectively different from the population in their country of origin, not only with respect to their health, but also with respect to their education.

More information about Ben can be found on his website.

Visiting Fellow Ben Wilson has a new paper published in the European Journal of Population.

The open access paper is titled 'Understanding how immigrant fertility differentials vary over the reproductive life course' and reports on findings from a new analysis of Understanding Society, one of the largest longitudinal studies in the world.

This study shows that the childbearing of immigrants varies considerably in the UK, both over the reproductive life course and according to migration background. It implies that general statements about immigrant fertility are potentially misleading unless they account for this variation.

More information about Ben can be found on his website.

Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methodology and Associate at LSE Cities Dr Alasdair Jones is currently working with colleagues from across the EU on the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action 'Writing Urban Places'.

Within this action, Alasdair is a member of the 'Methodological Framework' working group. This working group has recently announced a call for papers concerned with 'Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places'.

Submitted abstracts must be less than 500 words and the submission deadline is 23 March 2020. Accepted papers will be published as a special issue of the 'Writing Place' journal. More information can be found here.

Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methodology and Associate at LSE Cities Dr Alasdair Jones has had a new article published in the journal Urban Studies.

The article is titled 'Public realm ethnography: (Non-)participation, co-presence and the challenge of situated multiplicity'. The article reviews and synthesises the methodological approaches taken by qualitative researchers interested in studying the use, experience and production of urban public realm settings.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Chris Pósch and Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson have recently had a new paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

This working paper is titled 'Truly Free Consent”? Clarifying the Nature of Police Legitimacy using Causal Mediation Analysis' and aims to draw an empirically informed conclusion as to whether police legitimacy can be partly defined as a normatively grounded form of obligation to obey the police.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department Jonathan Jackson has had a new paper accepted for publication in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology.

This paper is titled 'Functional and Dysfunctional Fear of Crime in Inner Sydney: Findings from the Quantitative Component of a Mixed-Methods Study' and reports on findings from a project into fear of crime in Sydney.

Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methodology Dr Flora Cornish recently published an article in The Psychologist. This article is titled 'Finding Joy in Decolonising' and reflects on a critical reading and dialogue group led by Dr Deanne Bell at the 2019 Festival of Community Psychology.

Flora will also be chairing a panel discussion on the topic of 'In a #ClimateEmergency, is civil disobedience a necessity?'. This panel discussion will follow the free screening of 'Necessity: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance' and takes place on Monday 2 March in CBG.2.04.

Members of the panel will include film director Jan Haaken and Hillary Vipond of Atlantic Fellows and LSE International Inequalities Institute.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Sonja Marzi will speak at the upcoming LSE Latin and Caribbean Centre event 'Participatory Research in Contexts of Violence and Insecurity'.

This event will bring together experienced researchers from LSE and El Colegio de Sonora to discuss the challenges and opportunities of using participatory research methods to investigate complex social problems with participants.

Having worked in Medellin, Sonja will share knowledge on the role of academic research in understanding and addressing pressing problems for residents in the region.

This event will take place on March 19 and you can register to attend the event here.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Nimesh Dhungana will be speaking at the LSE Department of International Relations on 'The politics of participatory disaster governance in post-earthquake Nepal'.

This talk is based on Nimesh's ethnographic fieldwork conducted in post-earthquake Nepal as part of his Department of Methodology PhD research. This research can be found here. Nimesh also recently published a related paper with Dr Flora Cornish entitled 'Beyond performance and protocols: Early responders’ experiences of multiple accountability demands in the emergency response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake' that examines the politics of accountability in the wake of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. 

The talk will take place in CON.7.03 on Wednesday 19 February from 12:30 - 14:00. For more information, please contact Nimesh via email.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Dr Kate Summers has been working as part of a team on a research project commissioned by the Trust for London.

This research project 'Living on Different Incomes in London: Can public consensus identify a ‘riches line’?' has now been published and asked, using focus groups, whether members of the public can identify and agree on what it means to be 'rich'. This included both descriptive and normative considerations.

The project concludes that while the groups were able to reach consensus on standards of living well above the minimum, including the wealthy at the top and the super rich at the very top, it was much harder to agree on a point beyond which greater resources could be considered excessive.

Kate was part of a team with colleagues from LSE CASE, the University of Birmingham and the University of Loughborough. Find more information here and on Twitter.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology Dr Eleanor Power recently met with Santa Fe Institute researchers to discuss a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

This project 'The effect of social networks on inequality' aims to explore the co-evolution of social networks and wealth inequality in small-scale human societies. Over forty researchers met to review their research, to plan future publications and to plan the second wave of data collection.

This workshop was held in New Mexico from 5-7 February 2020. More information is available here and on Twitter.

Methodology's Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Dr Alasdair Jones will convene a methods-based session at the International Sociological Association Research Committee 21 on Urban and Regional Development conference (RC21).

This conference takes place in Antwerp from 6-8 July 2020 and Alasdair's session is entitled 'Methods for understanding place-based urban communities as embodied experience and practice'. This will focus on urban studies research and research methodologies concerned with exploring place-based urban community as a socio-spatial phenomenon.

This session will be co-convened with Dr Zachary Neal (Michigan State University) and if you are interested in participating in this session, you can submit an abstract here. The deadline for abstracts is 15 March 2020.

Methodology's Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis Dr Audrey Alejandro will be speaking at the upcoming Data in Discourse Analysis conference.

This conference aims to bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss standards and strategies of handling research data in discourse analysis. Audrey will take part in a panel discussion on 'Data, Discourse, Fieldwork'.

This discussion takens place on Tuesday 18 February at TU Darmstadt. More information on the conference is available here.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methodology Dr Edward Ademolu was recently published in the Identities journal. 

Edward's article is entitled 'Seeing and Being the Visualised 'Other': Humanitarian Representations and hybridity in African Diaspora identities' and examines how humanitarianism representations affect British Nigerian identities.

Edward applies Bhabha’s hybridity theory to reveal distinct ways in which Nigerian audiences in the UK negotiate racialised identities and humanitarian representations.

The article has also been summarised by Carolina Are in the Humanitarian News Research Network. This summary concludes that Edward's research "makes important contributions to mainstream and critical scholarship in African diaspora identification and humanitarian/NGO representations". You can read the full summary here: 'Does Humanitarian Literature Assume NGOs' Audience is White-Only?'.

Methodology's Assistant Professor in Qualitative Methods Dr Ellie Knott was recently invited to the Politics and International Relations Department at the University of Reading to deliver a talk on her research on EU27 citizens.

Ellie's research discusses EU27 citizens, often referred to as EU migrants, and how their identity and citizenship has been reconfigured through Brexit. As Ellie explains, methodological questions arise as to how to capture the diverse experiences of millions of individuals.

You can watch Ellie discuss her research here.

Methodology's Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis Dr Audrey Alejandro will be speaking at the Shape the World LSE Festival on 6 March.

Audrey will speak at an event entitled ‘Planet, Population and Rights’, discussing the complex relationship between demographic trends and climate change in the context of dire warnings of catastrophic and irreversible environmental disaster.

This event is one of a series of events exploring how social science can make the world a better place. Tickets are free and open to all, but a ticket is required. Online booking will open for events in the LSE Festival from 12:00 on Monday 10 February 2020. Full details here.

Professor of Research Methodology and Head of the Department, Jonathan Jackson recently presented at the Instutute for Global City Policing's one day Dealing with Violence Conference.

This conference took place on 31 January 2020 at UCL and was opened by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The main focus of the day was taking an evidence informed approach to the issue of violence and Jon spoke to between one and two hundred Metropolitain Police officers, particularly discussing the issue of trust.

The Department of Methodology's Professor of Quantitative Social Science Patrick Sturgis is leading a methodological review of the European Social Survey (ESS).

The ESS is an academically driven cross-national survey that is conducted across Europe. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with cross-sectional samples. Patrick's review aims to inform the future design of the ESS, its fieldwork procedures and impact strategy.

Other members of the Review Board are Mick Couper, Edith de Leeuw and Piet Bracke. You can find out further information and keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter. 

Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science Dr Blake Miller will teach a new course at the LSE-PKU Summer School in Beijing.

Blake's course is entitled 'Data Collection and Management with Python' and aims to provide students with the necessary tools for the construction, pre-processing and cleaning of data found online.

After taking this course, students will have mastered the requisite tools needed to construct datasets out of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured online data.

For more information and to keep up to date with Blake, you can follow him on Twitter.

Methodology's Professor of Quantitative Social Science Patrick Sturgis will deliver a talk at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle on 14 February 2020.

Patrick will take part in a panel discussing 'Public Trust in Science: Strength and Skepticism', bringing together international perspectives on how publics view and connect with science.

Patrick's talk 'Global Perspectives on Public Trust in Science' will present new data from the Wellcome Global Monitor, a new survey on public attitudes to science covering 140,000 respondents across over 140 countries.

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methodology Dr Ellen Watts will be speaking at the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Conference in Brighton on 10 January 2020.

Ellen will present work on celebrities and political representation. Following comments made by Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, Ellen will ask the question 'Are celebrities all just rich hypocrites, or can they be legitimate political actors?'

This conference will be hosted by the University of Brighton’s School of Media and the full programme of events can be found here.

Ellen also recently published a related article on politics and celebrity, discussing 'Stormzy, status, and the serious business of social media spats'. This article explores why it matters what Stormzy says about politics, and why it might matter even more what politicians say about Stormzy.