Archives: Research

Assessing inequalities in health, wellbeing, and social participation outcomes for young carers in the UK

Carers are increasingly important in providing help and support to people with a health condition or who have trouble with everyday activities. Children and young people who provide care (“young carers”) are an often overlooked but important group of carers. Young carers are a particularly difficult group to recruit and retain in large scale longitudinal population studies. There have been very few longitudinal studies of young carers thus far and most of the previous research has been cross-sectional. There has also been very little exploration of inequalities in the effects of being a young carer to look at whether associations differ by gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic circumstances.

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June 9, 2023
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Understanding Recent Fertility Trends in the UK and Improving Methodologies for Fertility Forecasting

The project ‘Understanding Recent Fertility Trends in the UK and Improving Methodologies for Fertility Forecasting’ will examine the significant fluctuations in fertility levels in the UK in the last two decades, will investigate their causes, and will develop improved methodologies for fertility forecasting. The last two decades have witnessed dramatic changes in fertility levels, which were not predicted by demographers or government statisticians: Fertility significantly increased in the first decade of the 21st century, whereas it has declined thereafter.  These changes when translated into numbers of births, have had important implications, for example in the provision of health services, childcare, and school places. The project aims, first, to produce detailed measures of fertility changes in recent years in the UK. Second, it will decompose the overall changes into those attributable to compositional changes in the UK population, e.g. by country of birth, migrant population, education, and those which are attributable to behavioural changes over time, i.e. women have fewer or more children. Finally, these insights will be used to develop new methodologies for more accurate forecasting of fertility applying them to the UK and its constituent countries. The developed methodologies could be applied to project fertility trends in other industrialised countries.

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November 14, 2020
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Developing the potential of the NILS and SLS for studying peer effects in health: A case study of fertility amongst neighbours and co-workers.

Neighbours and work colleagues can all potentially have an influence on our behaviour. For instance, poor health behaviours amongst neighbours and colleagues may normalise and reinforce our own poor health behaviours. This is one example of a peer effect. Imitative behaviour can cause small initial changes in individual behaviour to spread amongst their social networks and result in a ’social multiplier’ effect. Understanding the size and mechanisms behind the ’social multiplier’ effect allows for more effective health interventions. It also helps us understand why persistent health inequalities exist across different neighbourhoods and social groups.

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June 15, 2020
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Examining the factors associated with self-harm, suicide ideation and subsequent mortality through data linkage

Self-Harm (SH) and suicide ideation (SI) (i.e. thoughts about dying by suicide) are two of the most important known risk factors for death by suicide. Increasing suicide rates are a major public health concern and Northern Ireland (NI) consistently has the highest rate of suicide in the UK and Ireland. Recent nationwide policies to reduce suicide are now including a focus on reducing SH and SI as these are precursors to suicide. However, little is known about what causes SH and SI, how these two factors are related and what impact they have on mortality risk. Understanding the individual level, household-level, area-level and health related predictors for SH, SI and suicide is of vital public health importance so that intervention services can be targeted accurately.

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May 12, 2020
maternal-obesity.

Social and Economic Determinants of Maternal Obesity

The obesity epidemic continues to be one of the biggest public health challenges in the 21st century. Rates continue to rise globally and at all stages of the life course. In pregnant women this can be especially problematic due to the increased risk of pregnancy complications, subsequent non-communicable diseases, adverse birth outcomes and increased risk of obesity and metabolic diseases in later life for the offspring.

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May 12, 2020
irish language

Keeping it, losing it, or gaining it? The loss, retention and uptake of Irish in Northern Ireland 2001-2011 and UIster Scots in 2011

Language loss, retention, and gain amongst smaller languages has attracted much attention.  Most of this work has concentrated on communities or individual life courses although census data have been used to map spatial concentrations of language users, and patterns of advance and retreat through time.  However, there have been few quantitative population-level analyses which combine the general insights of the census with those from individual-level and community studies. Although the health benefits of learning and using a second language have been well recognised, there is also little evidence quantifying these advantages in relation to the general health and wellbeing associated with knowledge of another language in a post-conflict setting.

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May 12, 2020
A descriptive and empirical analysis of labour market change in Northern Ireland between 1991 and 2011, with a focus on the investigation of historic and emerging labour market inequalities.

A descriptive and empirical analysis of labour market change in Northern Ireland between 1991 and 2011, with a focus on the investigation of historic and emerging labour market inequalities.

Over recent decades Northern Ireland’s labour market has been characterised by inequality, largely as a result of its place within a religiously divided society. One manifestation of this division has been a higher average employment rate among the Protestant population relative to the Roman Catholic population. Many explanations were offered for this disparity, the most contentious of which was religious discrimination (see Smith and Chambers, 1991). Concurrent with legislation enacted to address such discrimination, Northern Ireland underwent much economic and social transformation. These events, it has been argued, made a joint contribution to reducing the religion-employment disparity (see Shuttleworth and Osborne, 2004) – but it is not clear whether this remains the case, or whether other inequalities have arisen (or displaced past inequalities). Indeed, it is much less clear whether inequalities within religious groupings (e.g. between Protestant denominations) have developed over time and whether these could be of greater significance than those between the two main communities.

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December 16, 2019
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