Environmental Audit CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Summary
1. The ESRC is the only UK funder of long-term, strategic social science research, identifying and addressing key societal challenges and coordinating the national social science research infrastructure to address them. The UK has an outstanding social science research base with most areas considered to be exceptional by world standards and ESRC-funded research and data resources support policy and practice across all sectors of the UK’s economy and society.
2. The submission below details, in brief, some of the activities that the ESRC is funding which relate to the topic of this inquiry. More details on any of these activities can be provided on request. In summary the ESRC is a key funder of research in the area of natural capital and other aspects of wellbeing. The Council is funding work via its research investments such as the Centre for Economic Performance, via a panel especially convened with the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) and via its longitudinal studies. The Council is also committed to building capacity in the area of quantitative data analysis.
Submission
3. The ESRC is a key funder of research in the area of natural capital, through its support of the National Ecosystems Assessment (NEA) and it’s follow on, Social and Environmental Economic Research (SEER) into Multi-Objective Land Use Decision Making, The Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU) and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) amongst others. SEER PI Professor Ian Bateman became a founder member of the Natural Capital Committee (NCC) in 2012. In early 2013 SEER submitted a contribution to the first Natural Capital Report to be published by the government in Spring 2013.
4. The ESRC has co-funded, with the NIA, a US National Academies of Science (NAS) panel on measurement of subjective wellbeing. The panel will be concluding its work with the publication of a report late in 2013. The remit of the panel is to review the current state of research and evaluate methods for the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB) in population surveys. On the basis of this evaluation, the panel will offer guidance about adopting SWB measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies. Although primarily focused on SWB measures for inclusion in U.S. government surveys, the panel will also consider inclusion of SWB measures in surveys in the United Kingdom and European Union, in order to facilitate cross-national analysis that complements comparisons over time and for population groups within the United States. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) National Wellbeing Programme and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have been fully engaged in the work of the panel. Representatives from ESRC investments sit on the panel: Professor Paul Dolan from the wellbeing strand of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) and Professor Amanda Sacker from the International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health which has several research strands related to wellbeing.
5. Professor Lucinda Platt, Director of the ESRC funded Millennium Cohort Study, is engaged with the ONS National Well-Being Programme as a member of the ONS Measuring National Well-Being Technical Advisory Group. The Millennium Cohort Study is funded by the ESRC and a consortium of co-funders across Government departments and the devolved administrations, and is housed at the ESRC Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education, along with the 1970 British Cohort Study and the 1958 National Child Development Study which are funded by the ESRC. These large-scale birth cohort studies offer a very important source of longitudinal data on well-being, as noted in a report published by ONS and Longview in July 2012, which also references the central role of Understanding Society in measuring well-being: The Measurement of Well-being: the Contribution of Longitudinal Studies.
6. Understanding Society carries a range of wellbeing measures including life satisfaction on several dimensions—most of these measures had previously been included in the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) so they provide a long run of data on consistent measures allowing analysis of change for the population as a whole but also change at the individual level. Understanding Society also carries other measures of wellbeing including the well-validated Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) and related measures of distress (the General Health Questionnaire 12), of self-efficacy, of quality of family relationships and of social support. Understanding Society also carries a range of other measures of human and social capital. The ONS has used some of the BHPS and Understanding Society data in its well-being reports.
7. A member of the Understanding Society team, Professor Steve Pudney, has been involved in providing technical advice to the ONS on well-being measurement. He has also undertaken research on well-being measurement in surveys based on experimental data from the Understanding Society Innovation, reported in an ISER working paper: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/iser/2010–20
8. Making use of survey data requires skills in quantitative methods (QM). The ESRC are aware of capacity needs around quantitative skills, and have put in place a range of measures to address them. Our Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) have a number of studentships annually ring-fenced (or “steered”) for Advanced Quantitative Methods (AQM) and economics (including behavioural economics). In both years of the DTCs’ operation, this target has been exceeded.
9. In order to improve the “pipeline” issue of QM-skilled postgraduates coming through, ESRC have partnered with HEFCE and the Nuffield Foundation in a call for Centres of Excellence in Undergraduate Quantitative Methods, to fund undergraduate QM teaching. ESRC have previously funded smaller-scale activities at the undergraduate level with HEFCE—but this Centres Call is designed to impart a step change in this area. The Funders set out the Call to be permissive and encourage innovative applications, including ideas such as a 3+1 undergraduate degree model and discipline-embedded quantitative methods degrees.
10. ESRC has already considered work to link the area of natural capital and subjective wellbeing—at present, other than several awards through responsive mode schemes, this is an under-resourced area. Plans are underway to encourage work in this area.
13 June 2013