Last Thursday I had the honour of speaking at the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) flagship event celebrating the social sciences, held at the British Academy. This forms part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science, now in its ninth year. The festival is a real celebration of the breadth of social science research, with well over 100 events around the country including major cities like London, Belfast, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Manchester.
Social science is a global science, with enormous impact on how we live our lives worldwide. And the UK is a world player – ESRC’s international benchmarking exercises have judged the UK to be second only to the US in anthropology, economics, political sciences, psychology and sociology.
Social science shapes public policy and services, informs welfare reform and enhances civil liberties. This was effectively demonstrated at last Thursday’s event with the launch of ESRC’s ‘Celebrating the social sciences’ publication supported by an informative short film. It shows how beneficial our expertise in this area is to policy-makers and the public alike. Some examples include:
The ESRC-funded Centre for Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies explained the shock to the public finances caused by the recession, informing Government officials, politicians on all sides and the media.
- A review carried out by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods/Lancaster-Warwick-Stirling node led to a new policy report and a major revision of the scientific evidence underpinning DNA database policy.
- Data from the Millennium Cohort Study were used extensively by the Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances, commissioned by the Government in 2010. The University of Bristol’s review report emphasised that the first five years of a child’s development life has the strongest impact on their life chances, strengthening the Government focus on ‘Foundation Years’ services.
The £33.5 million investment announced earlier this year in a new Birth Cohort Facility project will take this important work even further. It will support the biggest longitudinal study ever undertaken in the UK – involving 90,000 children – as well as providing computing capacity to ensure we can analyse data from all the previous cohort studies. This will give us a broader and clearer picture than ever before of social mobility over the past 65 years.
The studies are a shining example of the UK’s support for the social sciences, and our expertise in interpreting research data. However looking ahead, the social science community also faces a series of challenges:
- The ‘fruits’ of social science: We need to get better at showing the relevance of our quality research – the ESRC’s evidence briefings are an excellent example of this, such as the one on supermarket productivity and planning.
- Data-mining: We must look for ways to use more data from existing research – the Birth Cohort Facility will provide a great opportunity for this.
- Transparency: I very much welcome ESRC’s continued commitment to work with Research Councils and others to meet the issues around open access facing the wider research community.
- Evidence-based policy: I want to see us build on social science’s already excellent record of informing and shaping Government policy.
We should recognise and celebrate the social sciences and the enormous contribution the UK makes to a global body of knowledge. The social sciences vastly improve our understanding of the world around us – our society, our economy, our quality of life and public health – and most importantly they help us improve the outcomes of people from all backgrounds and areas of society. Everything I heard at the Festival of Social Science suggested to me that even in the difficult financial climate we face today, the social sciences are thriving here in the UK.
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