University of Southampton Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries

Harnessing the power of dataThe £7.6m consortium providing access to government data

The internet health revolutionPioneering web-based health interventions

Predicting voter behaviourUsing polling data to forecast election results

Combating malaria with mobile phonesTackling worldwide eradication of malaria

Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries 2014

In this issueWelcome to Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries. Researchers across Social and Human Sciences cover a breadth of areas including maths, geography, education, social sciences and psychology. Within each of these areas, our academics are using data to address some of the most challenging issues facing society.

On page four, find out how we are using anonymised mobile phone data across low-income countries, to track population movements and help eliminate malaria around the world.

On page 10, read about our new £7.6m consortium that will provide access to government data for academic research, part of a major investment by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in ‘Big Data’.

Southampton psychologists have pioneered the development of a unique open source software package, which offers web-based personal health advice and interventions that encourage patients to change their behaviour, to help them achieve a better quality of life. Find out more on page 12.

Finally, our academics are leading the way in forecasting parliamentary election results. You can read more about this on page 16.

For more information, visit our website www.southampton.ac.uk/shs

Please send us your feedback

We are keen to receive any feedback you have about Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email them to [email protected] 1

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More highlightsImproving schoolsOur researchers are developing new ways to evaluate and inform educational policy. Page 18

Power of mathsMathematicians are developing new tools to help prevent large-scale blackouts. Page 20

Pollution forecasting potential Air pollution forecasting could help millions of people with respiratory illnesses. Page 22

1 Combating malaria with mobile phones

Geographer Dr Andy Tatem’s research is changing the way we are tackling the elimination of malaria.

Page 4

2 Harnessing the power of data Researchers from the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) are at the forefront of a £15m consortium that will provide access to government data for academic research.

Page 10

3 The internet health revolution Southampton researchers have

pioneered the development of the unique LifeGuide software. Page 12

4 Predicting voter behaviour Will Jennings, Professor of Political

Science and Public Policy, is using polling data to forecast election results.

Page 16

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44 Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries | University of Southampton

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Combating malaria with mobile phonesSouthampton research is at the forefront of the worldwide battle to eradicate malaria. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Geographer Dr Andy Tatem’s research is changing the way we are tackling the elimination of malaria in individual countries and across continents.

An international study, led by the University, has used anonymised mobile phone usage data to help combat malaria more effectively

5Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries | University of Southampton

There were an estimated 207 million cases of malaria in 2012.


Andy is harnessing anonymised mobile phone usage data to map the movements of populations in and between malaria ‘hotspots’. He explains: “Understanding the movements of a country’s population can be crucial in eliminating malaria. Attempts to clear the disease from an area can be ruined by highly mobile populations quickly reintroducing the parasite.” This work is part of the Malaria Atlas project, which began 10 years ago and aims to build better evidence on malaria risk, and produce more accurate ‘malaria maps’ to guide policies for elimination programmes and interventions.

There were an estimated 207 million cases of malaria in 2012 and approximately 627,000 deaths. In 2012, malaria killed an estimated 482,000 children under five years of age, which equates to 1,300 children every day, or one child almost every minute. Between 2000 and 2012, the scale-up of interventions helped to reduce malaria incidence rates by 25 per cent globally, and by 31 per cent in the World Health Organization African Region.

Now, an international study led by the University and the National Vector-borne Diseases Control Programme (NVDCP) in Namibia and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) has used anonymised mobile phone usage data to help combat malaria more effectively. Andy and his team have created population mobility maps with this data, which are making the eradication of malaria a real possibility. Andy comments: “Previously, the only data available to us on population mobility were occasional household surveys and some border crossing information, but anonymised mobile phone usage data give us incredible detail on how millions of people are moving around over time periods of months and years. Now that 90–95 per cent of the population are using mobile phones, we have an incredible amount of data at our disposal.”

Worldwide eradication

The patterns of population movements revealed by these data however, were sometimes not what the team expected. In previous work with the government of Zanzibar, the team’s initial expectation was that malaria elimination would be incredibly

difficult on the islands, due to their proximity to mainland Tanzania, where high levels of malaria transmission exist and the probable large amount of travel between the mainland and Zanzibar, carrying parasites. “The anonymised mobile phone data told us that the vast majority of people were just moving to and from the city of Dar Es Salaam on the mainland, where there is very little malaria risk. These findings have guided Zanzibar, and other countries where we have found similar results, towards thinking more seriously about elimination programmes,” Andy says.

By combining the results of these studies with information about diagnosed cases of malaria, topography and climate, the researchers have been able to identify geographical ‘hotspots’ of the disease and design targeted plans for its elimination. Specifically they have helped with the targeting of insecticide-treated bed net distributions in Namibia in 2013, and will continue to help the NVDCP prepare for a large-scale net distribution in 2014 and the deployment of community health workers.

Andy believes that regional elimination of malaria could lead to total global eradication. “Our findings suggest it may be possible for malaria elimination to proceed like a ratchet, tightening the grip on the disease region-by-region, country-by-country, until eradication is ultimately achieved – but without the need for a globally coordinated campaign,” he explains.

After elimination in a region, malaria importation poses a constant threat, which Andy’s research is helping to tackle. He comments: “Because humans and mosquitoes carry the disease from endemic areas across international boundaries and within countries, it is crucially important to monitor and contain outbreaks and avoid endemic transmission from restarting.”

Population mapping

The use of anonymised mobile phone data is one example of how new technologies are overcoming past problems of quantifying and gaining a better understanding of human movement patterns in relation to disease control. u

“Our findings suggest it may be possible for malaria elimination to proceed like a ratchet, tightening the grip on the disease region-by-region, country-by-country.”

Dr Andy Tatem, Reader in Geography


40 countries and sub-regions around the world now have targets of totally eliminating malaria from their borders, using the guidelines laid out by the team in collaboration with the World Health Organization on how to conduct elimination feasibility assessments, using evidence from mapping, mobile phone analysis and mathematical modelling.

Andy’s work is having a global impact beyond malaria elimination. As the Director of the WorldPop project, Andy is collaborating with staff in Demography and Social Statistics to map population distributions in low-income countries. The WorldPop website provides open access to spatial demographic data, which can be used to help tackle challenges such as poverty, public health, sustainable urban development and food security.

Andy says: “Our maps and data are helping charities, policy-makers, governments and researchers to make decisions which affect the quality of people’s lives. These could be as diverse as predicting the spread of infectious diseases, planning the development of transport systems or distributing vital aid to disaster zones.”

The devastation that many natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes cause, means that populations become displaced. Traditionally, in such situations, the way of quantifying where people are for delivering assistance and relief has been to take headcounts at refugee camps. WorldPop’s linkage with the Flowminder Foundation is enabling pioneering work in using anonymised phone usage records to map these displacements, while also providing baseline data on numbers impacted. “In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with devastating effect, international organisations were able to download information about pre-typhoon population distribution from our website to help with estimating impact and delivering aid efforts,” Andy explains.

WorldPop combines country-specific data from national statistics services, household surveys and other sources to construct detailed population distribution maps. Satellite imagery is also exploited to provide

information on the density of urban areas, land cover and transport networks, all of which are used to improve the accuracy of the population maps.

The website currently provides freely-available data for Central and South America, Africa and Asia – providing maps of population numbers and age distributions, births, pregnancies, urban growth and rates of poverty. Each country has its own summary page and the user can choose from a range of high resolution maps of their particular area of interest to download. “The global human population is growing by over 80 million a year, and is projected to reach the 10 billion mark within 50 years. The vast majority of this growth is expected to be concentrated in low income countries, and primarily in urban areas. The effects of such rapid growth are well documented, with the economies, environment and health of nations all undergoing significant change,” Andy explains. “High resolution, contemporary data on human population distributions and their compositions, which WorldPop provides, are necessary to accurately measure the impacts of population growth, in order to monitor change and plan interventions,” he adds.

Maternal and newborn health

Most recently, these maps have been translated into births and pregnancies datasets, by Andy and Social Statistician Professor Zoe Matthews, and are the focus of a new UN report on the ‘State of the World’s Midwifery’. Southampton research is now helping to establish the need for health facilities in low income countries, by ascertaining how many pregnancies occur within certain distances of existing facilities, and the specific rates of maternal and newborn health risks in these countries.

Zoe comments: “The technology exists, data is increasingly available, and concerted efforts to drive an open-access, open-source data revolution on maternal and newborn health geography will reap huge dividends in improving the quality of care available, and ending preventable maternal and newborn deaths. The goal is simple: to ensure that the place of birth does not determine the right to life.”

“Concerted efforts to drive a data revolution on maternal and newborn health geography will help ensure that someone’s place of birth does not determine their right to life.”

Zoe Matthews, Professor of Global Health and Social Statistics

Andy adds: “For 75 countries in the world, with the highest burden of maternal and newborn health problems and deaths, we are establishing over the next 15 years what their trends are in terms of births and pregnancies, what their needs are in terms of midwifery and staffing of facilities, in order to build an evidence base for helping lower the risk of maternal and newborn health problems.”

Through WorldPop, Andy’s work is also contributing to polio vaccination programmes, by helping to better determine how many children under five there are in a given region. He explains: “We have to try to get close to vaccinating over 90 per cent of children under five. In many resource-poor inaccessible regions, there aren’t good maps or estimates of how many people there are, or where they are, but our work is helping to combat this.”

He continues: “The research we have undertaken through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped to shape our focus to work towards both global polio and malaria eradication, which we believe to be a real tangible possibility for the future.”

For more information on population change research at Southampton, visit www.southampton.ac.uk/weareconnected To find out more about WorldPop and the Flowminder Foundation, visit www.worldpop.org.uk and www.flowminder.org


Population maps are being translated into births and pregnancies datasets

Image © MamaYe Africa


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Harnessing the power of dataResearchers from the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) are at the forefront of a £15m consortium that will provide access to government data for academic research. Director of the new Centre and Deputy Director of S3RI, Professor Peter Smith explains more.


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Q What groundbreaking research is currently underway at S3RI?

S3RI work spans five research themes: biostatistics, policy and evaluation, design and analysis of experiments, modelling, and sampling and survey methods. Our statisticians collaborate with researchers from other areas of the University and from other institutions worldwide, as well as sharing our expertise with partners from industry and the public sector, building productive relationships with organisations such as GlaxoSmithKline, the Met Office, the Office for National Statistics and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA. Our cutting-edge work is being taken up by clinicians, scientists, engineers and government bodies, as well as by people who need effective techniques to understand surveys and databases.

Q What is the purpose of the new Centre?

The new Administrative Data Research Centre for England (ADRCE), hosted by S3RI, is part of an initiative to enable information routinely collected by government departments and other agencies, such as tax, education and health data, to be shared with researchers. The Centre is part of a major investment by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in ‘Big Data’.

Q What do you hope to achieve through the ADRCE?

Our vision is to see these data transformed into knowledge and evidence which can be used to inform public and economic policy, helping to tackle some of the major issues facing society in an innovative and efficient way. We will manage and maximise the use of new data linkages across government departments and sectors to give safe, secure and strictly managed access to anonymised data for research purposes.

Q Who else are you working with to establish and manage the ADRCE at Southampton?

The Centre will be run in collaboration with University College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the University of London’s Institute of Education and the

Office for National Statistics. As the Centre’s host, S3RI will work with colleagues in Geography, Engineering and the Environment and the University’s information and communications technology professional services department. This will enable administrative datasets to be linked across different services and government departments to make them accessible for research.

Q Why is it so important that this Centre is hosted at Southampton?

Holding these type of government data at an independent institution such as Southampton is the key to the project’s success. If the data was held by a government agency, for example tax information at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) they may receive requests from private companies to use the information to investigate benefit fraud or other such issues. However, these data are only to be used in legitimate research, and having them stored in one independent place negates these issues. As a founding partner of the Open Data Institute, the University is already at the forefront of innovation to help the public sector make more effective use of the information it holds. This project will extend and specialise our expertise in this field and provide a crucial facility for accredited academics conducting public policy related research.

Q Will there be other centres in the UK similar to the ADRCE?

It will be one of four such centres for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which with the newly formed Administrative Data Service (ADS) acting as ‘gatekeepers’ to the research data, will form the Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN). The four ADRCs and the ADS will benefit from a grants package totalling approximately £34m from the ESRC. This represents the first phase of £64m of ESRC investment in big data, to support the development of a network of innovative centres to strengthen the UK’s competitive advantage in this field.

Q How will researchers access the data held by the ADRCE?

The Centre will provide state-of-the-art secure facilities with access to high-performance computer systems, database management systems and advanced data analysis and statistical tools. This will enable administrative datasets to be linked across different services and government departments to make them accessible for research. Researchers will have to come to Southampton to use the secure lab to access the data, and there will be controls regarding what data can be taken away from here. In five years’ time it could be possible for researchers to access the data remotely. The idea is to set up a secure server that can have up to 100 concurrent uses, so we could have up to 100 projects being undertaken at the same time.

Q What do you hope the centre will bring to Southampton in terms of S3RI’s future work?

The rise of big data will make it crucial to find robust ways of modelling variation within large and complex datasets to generate meaningful information. As hosts of the ADRCE S3RI’s focus will be on making sure that happens in the UK.

For more information: visit www.southampton.ac.uk/S3RI

To find out more about the ADRN, visit www.adrn.ac.uk


LifeGuide offers the public 24-hour access to extensive automated information and advice on any health problem


The internet health revolutionProfessor Lucy Yardley, Head of the Centre for Applications of Health Psychology at Southampton, has pioneered the development of the unique LifeGuide software, which offers web-based personal health advice and interventions to the public. The software supports patients with a variety of diagnosed illnesses, to change their behaviour, and help them achieve a better quality of life.

The LifeGuide project started five years ago with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Since then, Lucy’s team has received £1.5m funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to build the software into smart phones, so that more people can have access to this help and advice. During this period, LifeGuide-based collaborations have attracted over £20m of external funding to develop and trial numerous health-related interventions.

Interventions designed to influence people’s behaviour are a fundamental part of daily life, whether in the form of personal advice, support and skills-training from professionals, or general information disseminated through the media. Online interventions and advice can be a cost-effective alternative, to face-to-face personal advice and support.

As part of this project, social scientists and computer scientists are working closely together to develop the software, using extensive consultation through workshops to obtain researchers’ views of how to make LifeGuide fit for all requirements.

Lucy says: “The LifeGuide platform eliminates the costly waste of resources involved in programming online health interventions individually, and allows people to easily test, modify and improve these interventions based on their findings. What’s more, it is increasing the number of researchers who can engage in this type of research, opening it up to those with limited funding, such as early career researchers and students.”

Patient benefits

LifeGuide interventions have already been developed for a wide range of illness management and public health applications. Many of these interventions have been trialled or rolled out successfully to many thousands of patients and health professionals. It has also been used to help people lose weight, stop smoking and cope with conditions such as stroke, cancer, diabetes and pandemic flu. Most notably, LifeGuide has been used in a study that halved the number of unnecessary antibiotics being prescribed by GPs in Europe. u


Lucy explains: “Advice on coping with health problems is not always readily available to everyone. The internet can give 24-hour access and is a low cost way of extending convenient healthcare for millions of people around the world. LifeGuide enables researchers and practitioners with no prior knowledge of computer science to use innovative software to support their healthcare and wellbeing initiatives. The unique software can be used to provide tailored information to patients, send them emails and text messages, evaluate results and much more.”

For commercial companies and healthcare agencies, LifeGuide offers a cost-effective opportunity to provide the public with 24-hour access to extensive automated information and advice on any problem. The advice can be specifically tailored to address the particular situation, concerns, and preferences of each individual, and intensive daily support can be provided for behaviour change.

An international network of researchers recruited through workshops and demonstrations are collaborating with the team in evaluating and developing LifeGuide by applying it to a range of global health challenges. The interventions include: the Internet Doctor, which provides people suffering from common conditions like colds and influenza with information and advice to cope with their symptoms, and an intervention to promote and support hygienic behaviour to reduce the spread of infection, especially during pandemic flu.

The Internet Doctor website asks patients a series of questions about their illness in a similar way to being at a face-to-face GP appointment, or via NHS direct. By using the Internet Doctor, the intention is that more people who are able to self-manage cold and influenza symptoms will be doing so, saving themselves and GP surgeries time and money. These online interventions can also help to reduce the problems associated with accessing services due to geographical location, long waiting lists or shortages in appropriately trained staff.

Practitioner usage

The particularly unique and revolutionary aspect of LifeGuide’s online interventions, is that the software can be easily managed, tailored, and personalised to the patients’ needs, without the need for input from software developers. In a recent paper published on healthcare workers’ experiences of LifeGuide, researchers could see the potential of LifeGuide as a successful tool for developing and delivering online interventions. Those who had past experience working with programmers in earlier phases of intervention development described the previous difficulties in communicating their requirements with the programmers, as the result of working in such different fields with different ‘languages’. LifeGuide diminishes these difficulties, allowing researchers to easily control and develop the online interventions themselves, without relying on others.

Another advantage of using LifeGuide, particularly for research purposes, is that it is free to use, opening up behavioural intervention research to those who would not normally have the funds to do it, such as students, and early career researchers. What’s more, LifeGuide is a more convenient platform to test behavioural health interventions. Being able to simply upload interventions to dedicated LifeGuide servers counteracted any issues encountered with researchers’ own servers, or for those unfamiliar with the process of hosting on a server.

LifeGuide is a fundamentally collaborative project. Lucy says: “As well as working with the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham and University College London, one of my key collaborators at the University is Professor Paul Little in Primary Care and Population Science. She continues: “Paul has identified many good uses for LifeGuide interventions, and I work with many other social scientists, doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and computer scientists. Computer scientists have been vital in this project in order to develop the LifeGuide software, so that non-experts like me can use it to develop the web-based interventions.”

Looking to the future, Lucy is working on other web-based interventions to help with other health problems such as stroke rehabilitation, management of hypertension, back pain, eczema, respiratory problems and fatigue in cancer survivors (funded by Macmillan).

For more information, visit www.lifeguideonline.org


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“Advice on coping with health problems is not always readily available to everyone. The internet can give 24-hour access and is a low cost way of extending convenient healthcare for millions of people around the world.”

Professor Lucy Yardley, Head of the Centre for Applications of Health Psychology


Predicting voter behaviour Will Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, is using polling data to forecast election results. He is a lead author of the Polling Observatory blog published by the Telegraph.

Researchers at Southampton will be using diaries written in 1945 to consider public opinion of politicians at the end of the war


Q What is the Polling Observatory and what outcomes do you hope to achieve through this work?

The Polling Observatory produces a monthly estimate of support levels for political parties, using opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random noise that each individual survey inevitably produces. We also have a historical method to forecast election results, where we consider how public opinion tends to evolve over the electoral cycle. Before the last general election we took part in a symposium with various experts from around the world presenting their forecasts of the result. In addition to our poll-based method, there were some who generated forecasts based on the economy or on ratings of party leaders, but all came to a similar conclusion on the likelihood of a hung parliament – and we were largely proved right in our estimates.

Q What do you base your election forecasts on?

Using our statistical method, we consider all elections since 1945 to tell us both how closely the current polling is likely to reflect the election outcome, and which direction public opinion is likely to move in between now and election day, if it fits with the historical pattern. Our team use this method to look at how the election results have lined up with the opinion polls over past election cycles. The polls can tell us a substantial amount about the final result, even as far as a year and a half in advance of election day.

Q What research are you doing in terms of ‘anti-politics’?

Dr Nick Clarke, Professor Gerry Stoker and I have recently received a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to examine what and how British citizens have thought about politics since the 1940s. This should give us insights into the nation’s current lack of engagement with politics, a major concern in contemporary British society. Our research, due to start in October 2014, will explore the rise of disenchantment with formal politics in Britain and in turn help inform attempts by

politicians and policy-makers to address these problems. More generally the project is looking at how people’s understanding of politics has changed over time. We will be using diaries written in 1945, to ascertain how people felt about politics and politicians at the end of the war and comparing that with people’s attitudes today.

Q What does UKIP’s recent prevalence mean for your forecasting methods?

Many people have become disillusioned with politics, which means that predicting an election result is actually a little bit more difficult than it used to be, because support for the main political parties is lower than it has ever been before. What’s more, the looming presence of UKIP is causing us a real problem in terms of forecasting given the lack of historical precedent. It is very difficult when you have a party whose popularity is so difficult to predict. We don’t know if they’re going to gain 15 per cent, or 20 per cent of the vote, or see a collapse in their support as the election gets nearer. But UKIP is only part of the story as far as the anti-politics mood is concerned. Last year Gerry Stoker and I conducted a survey with YouGov, which showed that people’s discontent with politics is much more complicated than people think. It is not just about concern over the EU and immigration but is driven by belief that politicians lack the technical knowhow to solve problems facing the country, are short-termist, and are more interested in protecting the interests of the rich and powerful in society.

Q What other work are you doing on voting behaviour?

I have been working with Professor Jane Green from the University of Manchester to explain what are known as the ‘costs of governing’ for parties in power. Traditionally it was observed that governments tended to inexorably lose support over time, and our research finds that this is due to the accumulation of blame for perceived poor performance. More generally we have been looking at how voters evaluate the competence of political parties, across the UK, USA, Canada, Germany and Australia.

We find that the public evaluations of competence are subject to a high degree of common movement over time. This means that a major policy failure in one area doesn’t just influence perceptions on that policy; it can taint the public’s trust in a party on unrelated issues. We have presented our findings to senior strategists in the Labour and Conservative parties.

Q What other research interests do you have?

I have another ESRC project looking at the relationship between Thatcherite social and economic policies and crime rates, and criminal justice policy. There is an established theory (and much evidence) suggesting that the state of the economy is linked to rates of offending. We are interested in how the policies of the Thatcher governments contributed to forms of social and economic distress that led to increasing crime rates and subsequently to a rightward shift in the criminal justice agenda. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, various aspects of socio-economic change, such as unemployment and deindustrialisation, were associated with rising crime rates.

Q What are your ultimate aims when undertaking new research projects?

It’s fundamentally about achieving an evidence-based understanding of how politics and society works. The reality is that most of us have very stable views and we are quite unlikely to change them in the short-term. Most of us develop a stable political identification and set of beliefs through our upbringing and social networks. Whatever might be in the news on a given day, whatever the leader of a party says on a particular issue, if you hold a particular viewpoint or you’re inclined to vote for a particular party, your opinion is unlikely to change. I am interested in how and why people form their political opinions and how those respond to events, policy and other changes in political context.

Read the Polling Observatory blog at: www.sotonpolitics.org


In brief

Our researchers are developing new ways

of using attainment and progress data to

evaluate and inform educational policy,

and improve practice.

Professor Tony Kelly, Head of the Education

School, has recently completed a project

with the Jersey Community Relations Trust

and the States of Jersey researching the

educational outcomes of different community

groups there.

The large-scale research established a new evidence base in relation to educational participation and outcomes for different groups. This work coincides with Tony’s recent prize-winning theoretical work in developing new metrics for measuring equity within schools across the range of prior attainment and has caught the attention of academics and policy-makers in Europe and the US, who are exploring ways of using it for international data comparison studies.

“The UK is probably the most data-rich

schooling system in the world, and we should

be using this data to better effect in terms

of raising pupil attainment,” says Tony.

“However, there are tensions in this: on

the one hand we want to know which groups

are under-achieving; on the other, we don’t

want to lower expectations for these groups

so that the analysis becomes a ‘self-fulfilling

prophecy’,” he adds.

Improving schools


Young people’s digital literacyPhD student Huw Davies is undertaking research into the digital literacy of young people, and how they use the Web for information gathering.

He explains: “Previous research in my area has included a series of tests to demonstrate that young people from certain backgrounds don’t have the skills to use the Web effectively, to find and evaluate information. I’m more interested in what young people can do and if there are limitations in terms of skills and knowledge, how do we account for them? My preliminary findings show young people don’t necessarily believe what they read on the Web, but when they do it’s because it’s important to their sense of identity.”

Huw hopes to contribute to public policy debates about young people’s information and digital literacies. He adds: “I hope I will help further our understanding of how and why people from different social and educational backgrounds use the Web for information.”

Huw has worked with The Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, The British Sociological Association, publishing portal, The Sociological Lens, a community blogroll for sociologists, Social Theory Applied, and the Welsh charity, Wise Kids.

Maths in space Mathematical Sciences’ Professor Joerg Fliege has been invited to become a visiting researcher for the European Space Agency (ESA).

Many space engineering problems demand powerful and robust mathematical optimisation methods to increase the efficiency of the design and the operation of space missions. Various problems such as finding good interplanetary flight paths, optimal rendezvous spacecraft orbits, entry, descent and landing trajectories are currently very difficult to solve. Further mathematical developments in this area have the potential to save millions in fuel costs alone, generating enormous savings and enabling ESA to extend the lifetime of missions. It is these optimisation problems that ESA hopes to make some progress on in the near future.

Joerg comments, “ESA and the University of Southampton are highly interested in strengthening their links with each other, and this research visit provides an ideal opportunity to forge a stronger relationship in the areas of local and global optimisation for trajectory control, mission design, and other problems occurring in space engineering. I am grateful for the support of the ESA.”

Charitable givingResearch by Southampton economists has shown that people who receive higher bonuses are less likely to give to charity than those on lower earnings.

The study by Dr Mirco Tonin and Dr Michael Vlassopoulos also suggested that people receiving high bonuses tended to attribute their windfall to their own hard work or achievement, even if it was actually down to good fortune.

Dr Mirco Tonin comments: “Our findings suggest that receiving higher pay due to good luck is not generating a stronger need to ‘give back to society’. This is probably because people instinctively attribute their high pay or bonuses to being a reward purely for their own skills and effort, even if there is actually an element of luck involved. As such, they feel entitled to the money.”

The study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, set out to explore whether people who earn a higher income are more likely to give when placed in an environment in which earnings depend on luck, but not in a manner that makes its contribution obvious to them.


In brief

Power of maths

National energy grids occasionally suffer from catastrophic events leading to large-scale blackouts that impact on millions of people, creating costly and dangerous disruption. Mathematicians at the University sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have been working with experts in power engineering at Durham University to develop new tools based on pure maths to help prevent and manage such events.

The research team, led by Professor Jacek Brodzki from Mathematical Sciences developed a technique which provides topological information about the functional structure of the grid. He says: “This information is used to create a ‘snapshot’ picture revealing the health of the network quickly, which gives the energy companies a way to accurately isolate faults and remove them from the grid, preventing further damage.”

As a demonstration of the power and flexibility of this approach, the team, which includes Dr Ruben Sanchez-Garcia, Conor Smyth, Iva Spakulova and Yukki Ikuno, has developed a prototype app to demonstrate the functional state of a power grid. They are investigating possible implementations of their results in collaboration with the National Grid, and energy producers Alstom and Scottish and Southern Energy.


Using open data to enhance participation PhD student Tim Davies is undertaking research to help both policy makers and practitioners work to better secure civic, democratic and inclusion outcomes from open data activities.

He explains: “The key issue my research addresses is how, with governments and other organisations publishing ever increasing quantities of data online, using ‘open data’ models, we can ensure that this contributes to greater civic participation, stronger democracy and more inclusive public services.”

To do this, Tim is analysing a large-scale expert survey of Open Data policies around the world known as the Open Data Barometer, alongside in-depth comparative analyses of policy documents from different countries. The outcome of Tim’s work will include a comparative analysis of open data across developed and developing countries, including the US, UK, Denmark, Kenya, India and the Philippines.

Tim collaborates with the World Wide Web Foundation on the related Open Data in Developing Countries project, and the Open Data Barometer, and has spent the last year as a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, where his time was spent focused on the impact of open data standards.

Reducing crimeProfessor Jenny Fleming, Co-Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, is the Southampton lead in a new consortium of eight universities funded by the government to implement a programme for the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction.

The Centre, a partnership between The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the College of Policing is part of a three year programme and aims to build evidence around what really works in reducing crime.

The consortium will equip practitioners and decision-makers with guidance and tools to help them make the best decisions on how to reduce crime, what action to take, what resources to deploy and for how long. It will contribute to increased public awareness of successful crime reduction methods, highlight areas where further research and development are needed, and inform national debates on effective crime reduction policies.

Jenny says: “Southampton has a wealth of expertise to bring to this consortium. Our interdisciplinary hub, the Institute of Criminal Justice Research, involves colleagues of all disciplines whose research interests include or complement criminal justice studies. This is one of the first What Works centres and I feel very privileged to be part of it.”

Global AgeWatch Index at United NationsProfessor of International Social Policy, Asghar Zaidi returned to United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York in February, as a lead speaker during the 52nd Session of the Commission for Social Development (CSocD).

The goal of the CSocD is to advise the UN’s Economic and Social Council and Governments on a range of social policy issues from a development perspective. By 2030, the percentage of the population aged 60 and above is expected to rise from 11 per cent to 16 per cent.

Asghar’s participation in the CSocD was driven by his continued support towards ensuring that the UN’s post-2015 sustainable development agenda ‘leave no one behind’ is inclusive, especially for the world’s ageing population. The data revolution that is required in support of the new sustainable development goals demands better quality and additional age-disaggregated data and its analysis.

The inaugural version of the Global AgeWatch Index was launched in 2013 by HelpAge International, and its update will be released on 1 October 2014. The Index identifies contexts around the world in which older people fare better, and points to policy interventions that are effective in reducing their vulnerabilities and promoting them as a resource to society. The Index is already helping many governments to improve the available data and ensure that it leads to better policy decisions.

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In brief

Pollution forecasting potential

Millions of Americans with respiratory illnesses could gain potential health benefits from improved air pollution forecasting developed by statisticians at Southampton. The highly reliable air quality forecasts are up to three times more accurate than previous ones, and mean people can limit their exposure to potentially harmful air pollution by reducing their outdoor activity when levels are high.

Professor Sujit Sahu from Mathematical Sciences and the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) worked with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create reliable and robust methods and software for forecasting future air quality levels using the available data from a sparse network of monitors.

The more accurate and reliable forecasts are potentially benefiting the general public, schools and local public health authorities, who may use them to plan their outdoor activities. The ability to limit exposure to high levels of air pollution can have a positive impact on long-term health and also has an economic impact as the need for medication, doctors and hospital admissions is reduced.


Next generation satellite sensors Geography and Environment researchers are helping the European Space Agency (ESA) to monitor key environmental markers. ESA is preparing to launch a series of satellites in 2015, called the Sentinel series that will provide data to support the European Commission initiative under the Copernicus programme. The information will be used in a wide range of operational services such as disaster monitoring, understanding carbon, water and nutrient cycles, agriculture, forestry and environmental monitoring.

Dr Jadu Dash, alongside scientists across Europe, is leading a project to develop algorithms for two satellites to estimate the levels of chlorophyll in vegetation. The team is using data from computer models and airborne sensors, which will be validated using ground measurements from a number of field sites in the UK, Spain and Italy. The result will be an even more comprehensive picture, which can be used by researchers to look into the productivity of vegetation and assess how this compares to the amount of carbon being captured and any changes in seasonal cycles.

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Digital peacebuildingFirst year Web Science PhD student, Jen Welch, is looking at the potentials of the Web in rebuilding post-conflict societies. Her research is fundamentally interdisciplinary and jointly supervised by Professor Susan Halford from Sociology, Dr Mark Weal from Electronics and Computer Science and Professor Gerry Stoker from Politics.

Jen explains: “I look at the role and emerging uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the field of peacebuilding. Through my preliminary research, I have been involved in organising the first international conference on ICTs for peacebuilding – Build Peace 2014.”

Build Peace 2014 took place in April at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) Media Lab in the USA and was sponsored by the MIT Center for Civic Media, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Peace Institute. The conference was attended by over 200 peacebuilding practitioners, technologists, academics and representatives from donor agencies around the world.

Jen comments: “We are currently working with the UN Alliance of Civilisations and the UNDP on their ‘PEACEapp’ challenge to encourage developers to create games for peace.”

Education ‘dropouts’ An analysis of survey data has shown that of 14 European countries, the UK has the least number of students dropping out of tertiary education.

Social statistician Dr Sylke Schnepf examined a large survey dataset called the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competency (PIAAC).

She found that of the 14 EU countries for which data are available in the survey, tertiary education dropout rates are lowest in the UK at just 16 per cent, followed by Norway at 17 per cent. The highest dropout rates are found in Italy with 33 per cent. In most of the countries men are significantly more likely to drop out than women, with the UK being a notable exception. The study shows across countries that if dropouts are compared with individuals equal in their characteristics, but without higher education experience, dropouts fare generally better in the labour market.

“People tend to think that it is negative for both individuals and society when students do not finish their education,” Sylke says. “My findings show that it can be more of an advantage to have taken part in tertiary education and dropped out, than not to have taken it up at all,” she adds.

For more information on these stories, visit www.southampton.ac.uk/shs


www.southampton.ac.uk/[email protected]

+44 (0)23 8059 8101

www.southampton.ac.uk/shs

University of Southampton Social and Human Sciences New Boundaries

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