More than 100 delegates attended the opening day of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) Conference 2009.
This year’s conference is covering subjects as diverse as whether it pays to be nice, if sharing household chores and childcare matter to a happy marriage and whether parents’ smoking influences their children’s decision to smoke.
Professor Thomas DiPrete
Special guest Professor Thomas DiPrete from Columbia University gave the plenary address on the issue of girls doing better than boys at school and university. Although his research was largely based on US data, he said there were many similarities between what was happening in the States and the UK.
More than 60 academics are presenting their research at the three-day event which is hosted by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
The conference provides an international forum for the exchange of research based on longitudinal data (surveys that interview the same people annually over time) such as the BHPS, which has been run by ISER since 1991. The event aims to bring together people from different disciplines ranging from economics, sociology, politics, social psychology, or research and survey methods.