Four of five successful bids to carry out research into the links between ethnicity and poverty on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) will make use of Understanding Society data, with two projects coming to ISER.
The JRF has just commissioned five new projects as part of its Poverty and Ethnicity Programme. The projects cover the following areas:
- Occupational and residential segregation among different ethnic groups and its contribution to poverty: two projects, one by ISER and one from Universities of Liverpool and St Andrews
- The persistence of poverty among different ethnic groups and the impact of the recession on this: ISER
- The extent, nature and role of social networks (the previous project was qualitative, this one involves quantitative analysis) : University of Manchester
- Projects of employment among ethnic minority groups in 2022: University of Warwick
The ISER projects
ISER’s Dr Alita Nandi leads the project, Poverty across ethnic groups through recession and austerity, which aims to provide empirical evidence on the incidence of poverty and within group income inequality across ethnic groups during the recent recession by making use of recent data from the Family Resources Survey (FRS) and Understanding Society. The project also aims to investigate the sources of differences across ethnic groups by comparing the composition of household income.
Dr Malcolm Brynin leads the project Poverty and ethnicity: the impact of occupational segregation, which will use the Labour Force Survey and Understanding Society to analyse the wage impact of occupational segregation on ethnic-minority poverty at the individual and household levels, test the impact of work in segregated low-pay occupations on future unemployment, map the specific occupations where poverty and ethnic inequality are highest, and then analyse why minorities tend to enter these, as well as the longer-term effects of work in occupational hotspots.
Why Understanding Society
Helen Barnard, who manages the Poverty and Ethnicity Programme at JRF, said:
“It would not be possible for our programme to examine these issues quantitatively in such detail without the size, richness and robustness of the Understanding Society dataset.”
She added that one of the key challenges for the researchers using the data and for JRF will be to demonstrate how the knowledge gained can improve the lives of people in the UK.
“The best way of defending the value of big data sets, including US and the Census, is to show that we can’t make good policy or practice without a real understanding of people’s lives that comes from this kind of detailed analysis.”
Professor Lucinda Platt, who leads on all matters related to ethnicity on the Understanding Society team, said the projects clearly demonstrated the unique strength of ethnicity in Understanding Society.
“The large sample sizes of different ethnic minority groups in the study and the richness of content relevant to understanding and comparing the experiences of ethnic groups across the UK make this research possible.”
She added that the findings from the projects, due to be completed in September, would bring very new insights to the important area of the complex relationship between poverty and ethnicity.