CSI Current Activities - Nuffield College Oxford University

Developing and implementing a new measurement framework for the Social Mobility Commission

CSI has undertaken a series of projects in collaboration with the Social Mobility Commission (an independent public body charged with monitoring social mobility across the UK, and with advising the government on policy for England). The CSI team includes Dr Yang Yu (Research Officer), Professor Yaojun Li (Nuffield alumnus and Professor of Sociology at Manchester University) and Anthony Heath.

The first project was to develop a new measurement framework for the SMC to enable the Commission to monitor trends in a timely and rigorous fashion. The new framework distinguished between mobility outcomes, intermediate outcomes (such as the educational attainment of young people from different social class backgrounds) and the potential drivers or causes of social mobility (such as childhood poverty). In addition to occupational class mobility, the framework also covered income mobility, educational mobility and housing mobility. This approach was described and implemented in the SMC’s statutory report to Parliament, The State of the Nation 2022: A Fresh Approach to Social Mobility.

Our second project with the SMC developed the approach, exploring intersectional analyses (with sex, ethnicity and disability) and comparing regions across the UK. In order to obtain robust measures for individual regions we developed composite indices for 41 sub-regions across the UK. The results were reported in The State of the Nation 2023: People and Places.

In our current project we are taking a more granular geographical approach, constructing indices for unitary and upper-tier local authorities in England and for council districts in Scotland and Wales. Results will be published in The State of the Nation 2024.

Developing a new module on attitudes towards immigration and refugees for the European Social Survey

The European Social Survey (ESS) is a pan-European research infrastructure providing freely accessible data for academics, policymakers, civil society and the wider public. It was awarded European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status in 2013. The first round of the ESS was conducted in 2002 and it has since run regular (biennial) surveys with harmonized design across Europe. 31 countries participated in the latest completed round.

Each round of the ESS contains a number of core questions which remain the same in each round. The core questions are supplemented with rotating modules on specific topics. In the very first round one of the rotating modules focused on attitudes to immigration, and this module was repeated in 2014/5 (the seventh round) with an international questionnaire design team led by Anthony Heath together with Eldad Davidov, Rob Ford, Eva Green, Peter Schmidt and Alice Ramos. (A topline summary of the round 7 results drafted for the ESS by Anthony Heath and Lindsay Richards is available at https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/TL7-Immigration-English.pdf).

We are now participating in the design of a third rotating module on attitudes to immigration, with new questions on attitudes towards refugees in view of the increasing salience of refugees and asylum seekers across Europe. We have reinforced our design team with new members from Eastern Europe (Michal Kotnarowski, Justyna Salamońska, Tymofii Brik and Andrii Gorbachyk). A particular interest in the new study is to understand how and why public attitudes towards accepting Syrian refugees differs from those towards Ukrainian refugees. We also hope to explore how and why attitudes towards refugees differ from those towards labour migrants (which has been the main focus of previous research). We also plan to explore the attitudes of European publics towards a range of policy concerns about the treatment of asylum seekers while they are awaiting decisions on their applications – for example whether they should be held in detention centres or allowed to work.