The Lancaster Postgraduate Statistics Centre CETL:building trust and statistical skills across disciplines

Statistics is often assumed to be a series of techniques. While it may be possible to teach postgraduate students generic techniques to enable them to carry out quantitative research, it is questionable how meaningfully this can be taught when separated from thinking about research data. Teaching students as close as possible to their own postgraduate degree scheme is one way forward, but this strategy presents teachers of statistics with new problems. Both students and departments have not necessarily understood statistics as a way of thinking - or understood it as a discipline with multiple and sometimes discordant approaches. The Lancaster CETL has allowed an opportunity to focus on teaching postgraduate statistics, yet in providing a focus for statistics attracts audiences from diverse interest groups. It presents us with the challenge to find a balance between what is possible generically and what needs to be specific

Data collection on trafficking in human beings in the EU:Final report

Trafficking in human beings is the buying and selling of women, girls, men, and boys. It has hugely deleterious consequences for individuals, society, and the economy. This is the fourth report published by the European Commission that presents a compilation of statistics at the EU Member State level on trafficking in human beings. This data collection exercise approached all 28-Member States and covers the years 2015 and 2016and updates the 2014 data collection as relevant

Support for PhD students: the impact of institutional dynamics on the pedagogy of learning development

This paper explores one practitioner’s learning development work with PhD students in a changing university context in which managerialism and financial stringency have combined. It questions how learning development practitioners can maintain their professional goals while negotiating issues arising from managerialism, financial stringency, task-oriented budgeting and inter-professional co-operation. While learning development workers have traditionally espoused a broad, colleagual view of student learning and practice which looks beyond remediation, a cash-starved sector may look for simpler, task-oriented definitions in which work is discretely allocated to different professional groups rather than dealing with dynamic, complex and overlapping processes. Hence, two teaching strategies are explored: the use of pre-course learning development tutorials as a means to tackle timeliness and efficacy of courses, and learning development contributions to supervision development courses

Tackling mixed messages:embedding advanced numeracy in graduate identities.

This paper proposes some elements of a university-level agenda needed to develop a cross-campus approach to numeracy. In the last ten years, there has been much work supporting the development of pedagogy surrounding maths and quantitative skills alongside discussion and innovation in teaching elementary statistics, as well as growth of excellent websites. But there are additional barriers to numeracy in graduates which may not be a part of individual lecturers’ remits and so are left unchallenged. We make the proposition that universities need to move beyond individual courses and degree schemes and start to think at institutional level in order to maximise the impact of innovations in maths and statistics teaching and learning to ensure that both specialist and non-specialist students are equipped to gain and maintain the employment that they want as graduates. Wider, cross-campus strategies can contribute both to raising awareness of the different constituencies and their teaching needs; and to tracking students’ development in maths and quantitative work across degree schemes

Framing homicide narratives in newspapers: mediated witnesses and the construction of virtual victimhood.

This article identifies ways in which newspapers invite readers to identify with victims and victimhood as a route to engaging them in ‘human interest’ stories. Within this framing of homicide for readers as ‘mediated witness’, some of the authorial techniques are explored whereby newspapers engage readers in a stylized dialogue that contributes to the construction of public narratives about homicide. It is argued that researchers, as well as working at a macro level, need to research at the micro level of textual analysis when researching media (including visual media) in order to understand the framing that contributes to public narratives; hence there is analysis of techniques of (a) defamiliarization and (b) objectification of homicide victims. These are some of the means by which the reader is placed as witness, both apparently ‘experiencing’ crime for personal consumption yet, publicly, allowed to recover (unlike real victims of major crime). The recognition of a need for micro-level analysis raises questions about the functions of public narratives, particularly in expressing, exploring and containing public or social emotion, in an era in which public responses to crime have been placed at the top of a highly politicized crime agenda

‘Marginal’ crime: the example of blackmail in representing evolving crime narratives

Newspaper representation of blackmail cases from over half a century (1960–2009) is used to illustrate ‘marginal’ crime reporting in an era of social change: we asked how such crimes fare in attracting public attention and what meanings they represent during a period of politicised, public and criminological narratives of crime and disorder. ‘Marginal’ crimes sit at the edges of crime narratives and at the boundaries of criminology, yet the example of blackmail indicates wider social concerns. A macro analysis of 252 cases showed a steady public profile with six major categories of blackmail reported. At a micro level, only 33 cases achieved sustained reporting, deriving meaning from current social anxiety; acted normatively – defining current group values; or were one of a palette of charges brought against individuals

Understanding deception:disentangling skills from conviction

Deception is often associated with economic gain and white-collar crime. But studying deception highlights the need for criminologists and practitioners to move beyond legal definitions and conviction rates when attempting to achieve depth in understanding criminality, its motivations and possible specialisms. Further, to explore the complexity of deception requires recognition of the range of skills inherent in this modus operandi, which is better recognised as a potentially-criminal tool found in much criminal behaviour. Theories that attempt to explain specialisation need to move on from a focus on crimes committed and give appropriate attention to skills employe