Power and politics in research design and practice: Opening up space for social equity in interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional and community-based research

Working collaboratively with communities is commonly considered a cornerstone of good practice in research involving social-ecological concerns. Increasingly, funding agencies also recognise that such collaborations are most productive when community partners have some influence on the design and implementation of the projects that benefit from their participation. However, researchers engaged with this work often struggle to actively engage community members in this way and, in particular, Indigenous peoples. In this article, we argue that useful strategies for facilitating such engagement are to leave space in the research plan for questions of interest to community partners and to encourage equitable interactions between all participants through the use of forums in which power dynamics are intentionally flattened. We demonstrate the use of this technique in an interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional research study involving the fate and transport of toxic compounds that lead to fish consumption advisories throughout the world. In this project, the use of participatory forums resulted in community partners in Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay area of Lake Superior shaping a key aspect of the research by raising the simple but significant question: ‘When can we eat the fish?’. Their interest in this question also helped to ensure that they would remain meaningful partners throughout the duration of the project. The conclusion emphasises that further integration of Indigenous and community-based research methods has the potential to significantly enhance the process and value of university-community research engagement in the future

An Exploratory Study of Food and Nutrition Instruction in Australian Primary Schools

Many Australian children have unhealthy dietary behaviours. These unhealthy dietary behaviours have been linked to rising rates of childhood obesity. Food and nutrition education plays an important role in shaping children’s dietary behaviours and schools have been identified as ideal location for such education to occur. Despite recognition of the importance of food and nutrition education evidence suggests adequate time is not being allocated to food and nutrition education in primary schools. To effectively educate, support, and encourage teachers to include food and nutrition education in their programs, it is critical to understand the influences that enable or constrain their current instructional practices. The international literature and a number of small exploratory studies in Australia point to possible influences, including poor food and nutrition related knowledge and lack of appropriate teaching resources. The research presented in this thesis aimed to investigate the influences on Australian primary school teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, organisational, community, and policy levels. The study utilised a convergent mixed-methods design, applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore influences on teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices. The quantitative phase of the research cross-sectionally surveyed primary school teachers’ (n=271) food and nutrition related attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, self-efficacy, and instructional practices. The qualitative phase of the research used in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=18) to explore teachers’ experiences and perceptions of food and nutrition education, including enablers and barriers to food and nutrition instruction. Primary school teachers, on the whole, had positive attitudes and beliefs towards food and nutrition education. Teachers were motivated to teach food and nutrition content because of the positive influence they believed it could have on children’s health outcomes, wellbeing, and learning. Furthermore, teachers had moderately high levels of food and nutrition knowledge and high levels of self-efficacy to teach food and nutrition content. The likelihood of teaching food and nutrition content increased the more a teacher felt prepared to teach such content. Furthermore, the number of hours spent teaching food and nutrition content appeared to be positively associated with self-efficacy to teach food and nutrition content. Despite teachers’ positive attitudes and beliefs, moderately high food and nutrition knowledge, and self-efficacy, the number of hours spent teaching food and nutrition was limited. Eighty-five percent (84.8%) of the teachers surveyed reported they currently taught, had taught in the past or planned to teach food and nutrition content in the future, however over half of these teachers (51.8%) taught five hours or less of food and nutrition content per year. Barriers to teaching food and nutrition content included: a crowded curriculum, pressure to prioritise ‘core subjects’, and limited access to appropriate resources. Enablers of food and nutrition instruction included: support from school leadership and parents, reinforcement of food and nutrition messages through school policies and planning, and embedding food and nutrition education into daily routines. The findings of this thesis highlight the importance of a multilevel approach to supporting food and nutrition education in primary schools. While teachers must be supported at an individual level to develop food and nutrition related knowledge and self-efficacy, it is essential to reduce the barriers that constrain teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices at the school, community, and policy levels. By acknowledging and addressing the range of influences that shape teachers FNIP, a multilevel approach to supporting food and nutrition instruction has the potential to embed food and nutrition education in primary schools and in so doing, support children to develop healthy dietary behaviours for life

Spatial and social mobility in England and Wales: A sub‐national analysis of differences and trends over time

Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. We bring these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post-war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. Our findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over time. While upward mobility increased in every region between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, this shift varied across different regions and tailed off for more recent cohorts. We also explore how domestic migration is related to social mobility, finding that those who moved out of their region of origin had higher rates of upward mobility compared to those who stayed, although this difference narrowed over time

Power and politics in research design and practice: Opening up space for social equity in interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional and community-based research

Working collaboratively with communities is commonly considered a cornerstone of good practice in research involving social-ecological concerns. Increasingly, funding agencies also recognise that such collaborations are most productive when community partners have some influence on the design and implementation of the projects that benefit from their participation. However, researchers engaged with this work often struggle to actively engage community members in this way and, in particular, Indigenous peoples. In this article, we argue that useful strategies for facilitating such engagement are to leave space in the research plan for questions of interest to community partners and to encourage equitable interactions between all participants through the use of forums in which power dynamics are intentionally flattened. We demonstrate the use of this technique in an interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional research study involving the fate and transport of toxic compounds that lead to fish consumption advisories throughout the world. In this project, the use of participatory forums resulted in community partners in Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay area of Lake Superior shaping a key aspect of the research by raising the simple but significant question: ‘When can we eat the fish?’. Their interest in this question also helped to ensure that they would remain meaningful partners throughout the duration of the project. The conclusion emphasises that further integration of Indigenous and community-based research methods has the potential to significantly enhance the process and value of university-community research engagement in the future

Spatial and social mobility in England and Wales: a sub-national analysis of differences and trends over time

Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. We bring these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post-war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. Our findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over time. While upward mobility increased in every region between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, this shift varied across different regions and tailed off for more recent cohorts. We also explore how domestic migration is related to social mobility, finding that those who moved out of their region of origin had higher rates of upward mobility compared to those who stayed, although this difference narrowed over time

Ethnic differences in intergenerational housing mobility in England and Wales

Home ownership is the largest component of wealth for most households and its intergenerational transmission underpins the production and reproduction of economic inequalities across generations. Yet, little is currently known about ethnic differences in the intergenerational transmission of housing tenure. In this paper we use linked Census data covering 1971-2011 to document rates of intergenerational housing tenure mobility across ethnic groups in England and Wales. We find that while home ownership declined across all ethnic groups during this period, there were substantial differences between them. Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi households experienced the strongest intergenerational link between parent and child housing tenure, and Black individuals had the highest rates of downward housing mobility. In contrast, those of Indian origin had homeownership rates similar to White British families, and a weaker link between parent and child housing tenure. These patterns are likely to exacerbate existing gradients in other dimensions of ethnicity-based inequality, now and in the future

Three essays on the economics of human capital development

This thesis is concerned with the role of formal schooling in the production of human capital over the lifecycle. While many studies have documented an associated between education and cognitive outcomes, less is known about the extent this association is causal---or the nature of the underlying mechanisms driving any effect. Chapter 1 examines the causal effect of additional secondary schooling on cognitive function in later life, using new methods in causal mediation analysis to explore the role of occupation choice as a key channel. The findings reveal robust evidence that basic education leads to improved working memory, but detect little support for effects on verbal fluency or numeric abilities. Staying in school for an additional year increases the probability of entering a higher status occupation, and an analysis of mechanisms finds that up to about one-fifth of schooling's effect on cognitive outcomes can be explained by occupation choice. However, the estimates are too imprecise to yield firm conclusions. Chapters 2 and 3 are situated in the school choice literature. The promise of school choice is to allow parental preference to influence which school their child attends, weakening the link between residential location and school quality. However, choice is typically constrained---and markets for schools are no exception. Popular schools tend to be oversubscribed, and inevitably many families miss out on a place at their preferred school. Chapter 2 traces the consequences of missing out on a place at a preferred secondary school in England, focusing on long run outcomes, including high-stakes examination results. The analyses do not find evidence that failing to gain a place at a preferred school leads to poorer academic outcomes---but those who miss out are more likely to engage in risky behaviours, drop out of secondary school, and have poorer mental health in adulthood. Finally, Chapter 3 assesses the effects of missing out on a place at a preferred primary school, on cognitive and non-cognitive skill development and parental responses. Little evidence is revealed for a detrimental effect on skill development, but compared with those who get into their preferred school, parents whose child misses out on a place are more likely to invest in private tutoring and exam preparation for selective schools

Heterogeneous effects of missing out on a place at a preferred secondary school in England

Schools vary in quality, and high-performing schools tend to be oversubscribed: there are more applicants than places available. In this paper, we use nationally representative cohort data linked to administrative education records to study the consequences of failing to gain admission to one’s first-choice secondary school in England. Our empirical strategy leverages features of the institutional setting and the literature on school choice to make a case for a selection-on-observables identifying assumption. Failing to gain a place at a preferred school had null to small impacts on short-run academic attainment, but was associated with reductions in mental health, increased fertility and increased smoking rates in early in adulthood. These effects were especially pronounced in areas which deployed a manipulable assignment mechanism to allocate school places, where we also detected detrimental effects on high-stakes examination outcomes. Our results show that schools are important in shaping more than test scores, and that the workings of the school admission system play a fundamental role in ensuring access to good schools

The Causal Effects of Adolescent School Bullying Victimisation on Later Life Outcomes

We use rich data on a cohort of English adolescents to analyse the long-term effects of experiencing bullying victimisation in junior high school. The data contain self-reports of five types of bullying and their frequency, for three waves of the data, when the pupils were aged 13 to 16 years. Using a variety of estimation strategies - least squares, matching, inverse probability weighting, and instrumental variables - we assess the effects of bullying victimisation on short- and long-term outcomes, including educational achievements, earnings, and mental ill-health at age 25 years. We handle potential measurement error in the child self-reports of bullying type and frequency by instrumenting with corresponding parental cross-reports. Using a detailed longitudinal survey linked to administrative data, we control for many of the determinants of bullying victimisation and child outcomes identified in previous literature, paired with comprehensive sensitivity analyses to assess the potential role of unobserved variables. The pattern of results strongly suggests that there are important long run effects on victims - stronger than correlation analysis would otherwise suggest. In particular, we find that both type of bullying and its intensity matters for long run outcomes