Developing an e-infrastructure for social science

We outline the aims and progress to date of the National Centre for e-Social Science e-Infrastructure project. We examine the challenges faced by the project, namely in ensuring outputs are appropriate to social scientists, managing the transition from research projects to service and embedding software and data within a wider infrastructural framework. We also provide pointers to related work where issues which have ramifications for this and similar initiatives are being addressed

Workshop on e-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals

Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Caroline Ingram report on a two-day workshop held at University of Lancaster over 6-7 September 200

e-Collaboration Workshop: Access Grid, Portals and other VREs for the Social Sciences

Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley and Michael Daw cover a one-day workshop reporting on the latest developments in e-Collaboration technology and applications

Multivariate survival models for repeated and correlated events.

Multivariate survival data typically have correlated failure times. The correlation is often the consequence of the observational design, e.g. clustered sampling, matching or repeated measures. We assume that the correlation between the failure or survival times can be accounted for by random effects or frailties in the hazard. We focus attention here on substantive problems where the random effects are not a nuisance, but are of primary interest as they have an explanatory role, for example, in genetic studies and longitudinal studies of recurrent or multiple events in which the processes operating at the individual level are under investigation. We present various analytically tractable random effects models for multivariate survival data. The paper contains two illustrative examples. The first concerns a treatment trial of heart patients and examines the times to onset of chest pain brought on by three endurance exercise tests. The second examines social and genetic effects in the association of ages to first marriage of twins

Testing for sample-selection bias due to location in the labour-market behaviour of respondents from the British Household Panel Survey

A five-state origin and destination competing risk labour-market model is formulated and applied to some individual-level labour-market data obtained from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The BHPS used a multistage stratified clustered sample design for selecting households and individuals. The primary sampling unit was the postcode sector. 250 out of a population of 8951 postcode sectors were selected. A test for the informative nature of the primary sampling units for labour-market behaviour is developed and applied to the BHPS labour-market data. The results suggest that the sample design is not completely ignorable for male and female labour-market behaviour.